Poetry in Prose

There’s no getting around the fact that Ben Lerner, author of the novel Leaving the Atocha Station, is primarily a poet, having published three collections before this foray into fiction. It’s not, in itself, a criticism. Beautifully written and keenly observed, the novel is more than passable as a sustained piece of fiction, coherent and effective at characterization, and with a number of compelling scenes.  But in his narrator’s concern with issues of translation, his asides on the function of poetry and the aesthetics of verse quoted in prose, and his pointed choice of words and phrases like “insufflation,” “hemic,” “the law of excluded middle,” to carry his meaning, Lerner imports the economy of language and density of thought more commonly associated with poetry.

Leaving the Atocha Station documents the stay in Madrid of Adam Gordon, a young poet on a fellowship in early 2004, tracing his development as a poet over that period. Gordon’s project, as described to the fellowship committee, is to produce a long, research-driven poem on the lingering effects of the Spanish Civil War on present-day Spaniards. The actual project Gordon has undertaken is more nebulous—a mystery even to himself—and not explicitly concerned with poetry. He avoids the other fellows and foundation staff and spends most days alone, reading Tolstoy and visiting a local art museum. Eventually he makes friends with locals, and is drawn into Madrid’s arts culture.

The first phase of my research involved waking up weekday mornings in a barely furnished attic apartment . . . then putting on the rusty stovetop espresso machine and rolling a spliff while I waited for the coffee. When the coffee was ready I would open the skylight . . . and drink my espresso and smoke on the roof overlooking the plaza where tourists congregated with their guidebooks on the metal tables and the accordion player plied his trade. In the distance: the palace and long lines of cloud.

This early passage encapsulates Gordon’s approach to his time in Spain as well as Lerner’s direct, borderline laconic, prose style. Gordon is forever modulating his state via spliffs, tranquilizers, alcohol, and “white pills” (probably antidepressants) that he self-administers in varying doses according to whim. Lerner documents moments like these in a straightforward, clipped style, alternating them with the rambling yet incisive intellectual meditations of Gordon’s internal monologue.

Lerner’s evocation of place is one of the novel’s great strengths. His use of Madrid as a backdrop is nearly as inspired as his choice to place Gordon there in 2004. Asked by his girlfriend, Isabel, why he is studying Spain and Franco now, instead of America under George W. Bush, Gordon can only make pretentious replies even he finds unsatisfying: “‘The language of poetry is the exact opposite of the language of mass media,’ I said, meaninglessly.”  When Isabel further challenges him, he greets her anger, “with silence, so as to allow her to imagine an array of responses I was in fact incapable of producing,” in his rudimentary Spanish. His clumsiness with the Spanish language parallels the inherent difficulty of his relations with other people—Isabel doesn’t remain his girlfriend for long—which in turn evokes the myriad difficulties Gordon has with poetry.  Even when he stumbles into a historic moment for Spain, it serves to rouse him only briefly: as all of Madrid masses for street demonstrations, Gordon pursues Teresa, a translator whose polite disinterest in Gordon as anything more than a fellow poet and friend is maddeningly clear.

Gordon is daft, arrogant, and petulant, while also being thrillingly sharp in his internal monologue. Lerner integrates a number of engrossing mini-treatises into the text in the guise of Gordon’s stream of consciousness. Reading the work of John Ashbery on a long train ride, Gordon notes that although Ashbery’s poetry uses “language that implied narrative development—‘then,’ ‘next,’ ‘later’—such  terms were merely propulsive.”  It’s a credit to Lerner’s facility sustaining the world of Gordon’s heightened, drug-addled intellect that such an observation feels not only unforced but fresh and engaging.

That observation also suggests a way of reading Leaving the Atocha Station. Time passes, and occasionally one of Gordon’s actions leads to something, but mostly the framework suggesting narrative development is, indeed, “merely propulsive.”  The novel is full of fascinating ideas, often displaying beautifully repeating patterns and surprising connections, but it falls short when it comes to plot. Lerner derives some narrative excitement from the historic moment mentioned above, and a bit more from Gordon’s pursuit of Teresa, and a tiny bit from his dilemma over whether to remain in Spain at the end of his fellowship. But by and large the novel’s events, such as they are, feel desultory, a string of occasions about which Gordon can pontificate. Combined with Lerner’s somewhat cool tone, the result is often a sluggish read.

But it seems fair to conclude that crafting a white-knuckle thrill ride was not Ben Lerner’s intent in taking on the novel.  As much as the novel is about anything, it is about Gordon fighting his way to an uneasy peace with poetry.  Where he begins the novel somewhat cynically, assembling meaningless poems by taking random phrases and then translating and mistranslating them, by novel’s end Gordon has reached a place of greater comfort in his relationship to poetry.  He arrives there by way of an almost-mystical process of gaining experience and confidence. It’s the same slow artistic growth encountered by any artist, and here it is rendered carefully, in invisible increments, by Lerner.  Poets, poetry readers, and especially fans of Lerner’s work will likely be excited, and rightfully so, to explore the author’s fascinating meditations in this new and fertile form.

Adam Reger is a graduate of the University of Pittsburgh’s MFA program in fiction. He is the author of U.S. Navy Pirate Combat Skills.

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Brick Lane by Monica Ali
(Scribner, 2003)
Eileen Y. Lee

“If God wanted us to ask questions, he would have made us men.”

Monica Ali’s most recently published novel, Untold Story, is the “what-if” tale of Princess Diana—what if the glamorous icon had not died in a Parisian car crash and instead had moved secretly to Midwest America with a new identity and taken up the simpler life?  The book was released in the UK during the run-up to this past year’s royal wedding media extravaganza.  Ali, however, started her writing career in different waters with the socially aware Brick Lane, the story of a married Bangladeshi woman living in London public housing.  This first novel thrust the Dhaka-born, Oxford-educated author into the literary stratosphere, earning her a nod as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists, while Brick Lane was short-listed for the Man Booker prize.

The beating heart of Brick Lane is Nazneen, a village girl who is sent to London for an arranged marriage to a 40-year-old man.  Part immigrant story and part meditation on the fate of women from a particular religious and cultural background, the novel is ultimately focused on Nazneen’s transformation from passive Muslim housewife into an individual possessed of free will who says, “I will decide what to do.  I will say what happens to me. I will be the one.”  This transformation happens—but not before one begins to wonder whether her richly-detailed life will simply collect dust as the narrative moves from 1985 to the months following September 11^th.

During its quiet unfolding, Brick Lane flits between Nazneen’s childhood memories of her sorrowful mother and letters from Hasina, the sister she had to leave behind in Bangladesh.  The letters depict a life filled with hardship and small joys, all written in Hasina’s broken English and naïve voice.  Even shocking details about her own rape and then a story about a friend burned with acid as punishment is told in several letters rather matter-of-factly.

As a chronicle of Nazneen’s marriage, Brick Lane is delightfully comical and at other times, sadly painful.  Early on, Nazneen learns to put aside any “high notions” of herself when she overhears her husband, Chanu, on the telephone: “Perhaps when she gets older she’ll grow a beard on her chin, but now she is only eighteen.  And a blind uncle is better than no uncle.  I waited too long to get a wife.”  Pretentious Chanu is continually the source of a good chuckle whenever he rails against the “ignorant types” of British society or forces his wife to listen to his pedantic speeches on philosophy or his “first love,” English literature.  “Have you heard of Richard II?” he says, “It’s not easy to translate.  Give me one minute.  This is a wonderful passage.”

Chanu is as equally proud of his university degrees as he is of his numerous framed certificates from night classes and correspondence courses on such varied topics as cycling and IT communications.  Driven to improve himself, yet ineffectual in his career, Chanu speaks constantly of a promotion that the reader—and Nazneen, as she grows more insightful—knows he will never get.  While a gentle soul, he can sometimes be heartless towards Nazneen, such as when he condescendingly mocks her suggestion to go to Dhaka to locate Hasina, who leaves her love marriage and must fend for herself in Bangladesh’s capital city.  He says:

“Shall I pack a suitcase?  Perhaps you have prepared one.  I shall go to Dhaka and pluck her instantly from the streets and bring her back to live with us.  On the way, I could pick up the rest of your family and we could make a little Gouripur right here.  Is that what you have in mind?”

It is only because of Ali’s sensitive regard for her characters that Chanu does not become a caricature of a husband.  Chanu eventually garners his own sympathy as his full portrait is painted, showing that he is a decent husband, loving father to their two daughters, and a man of quashed ambitions in a society that lumps him together with every other dark-skinned immigrant.

At its most incisive, Brick Lane is a sustained study of both its major and minor characters.  Even when the novel’s plot languishes midway through, the supporting cast in Nazneen’s life continues to shine.   Her best friend, Razia, is feisty (“Do you know why I’m going to learn English?  So that when my children start telling dirty jokes behind my back, I’ll be able to whip their backsides.”), but chooses to turn a blind eye to her son’s worsening drug addiction until nearly all the furniture in their home is sold.  She lives a life that matches her independent spirit only after her controlling husband is killed in a factory accident by the crush of “seventeen frozen cows.”  If there is a villain in Brick Lane it is Mrs. Islam, the elderly, sweet-tongued usurer lady, who will bring along her thug sons to enforce payments in the neighborhood.  Her changing relationship with Nazneen is woven throughout the story.

The most pivotal character is the decisive community organizer, Karim, who also delivers clothes for Nazneen’s sewing jobs and is therefore able to cross the threshold into her domestic world.  His appearance as her younger lover comes as a surprise, as is Nazneen’s decision to start attending radical Bengal Tigers meetings at his encouragement.  This is the first time the outside world penetrates her narrow life—as talk of the World Trade Center attacks comes to dominate the local meetings and her family’s mailbox becomes the target of a “leaflet war” that seeks to draw or erase the battle lines between “native” and “Islamic” elements.

Nazneen finds herself in turmoil over her relationship with Karim.  At these times, Ali’s graceful writing can unfortunately veer towards romance novel territory with such sentences as this: “Unbidden, a memory of Karim came, entering her as he entered her, tearing apart her passive soul.”

Karim sees Nazneen as a concept of maternity and security (“A Bengali wife.  A Bengali mother.  An idea of home”) and hopes they may marry, but time is running out as Chanu aspires to take his wife and daughters back to Bangladesh.  In the end, Nazneen’s choice is not between her husband and Karim, or London and Bangladesh, instead she must decide to be the director of her own destiny.  For those who have waited patiently for the dust on the pages to be swept away, the last chapters provide a frenetic energy and offer an ending filled with hope and new beginnings.

Eileen Y. Lee has a B.A. from Vassar College and a J.D. from Boston College Law School.  She studied abroad in London for one year and counts it as one of her favorite cities in the world.

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Powers of Attraction

Lauren Redniss’s Radioactive offers an illustrated history of Pierre and Marie Curie, whose partnership and research changed the world—for better and for worse. This 2011 National Book Award finalist cannot be called a picture book, though, or even a book with pictures. The former suggests something suitable for young children, and though its cover and spine glow in the dark, Radioactive wouldn’t work well as a bedtime story. Yet, “a book with pictures” isn’t quite right either, because the images are not subordinate to the text; to the contrary, they’re absolutely vital to the narrative’s success. The most pleasing term I’ve found to describe Radioactive—from sources ranging from The New York Times to NPR to Vogue—is a “visual” or “graphic” biography.

Redniss dedicates the first part of her book to the Curies’ lives prior to their discovery of radioactivity. We learn about Pierre and Marie’s upbringings, early romances, and eventual meeting in a Paris laboratory. Redniss quotes the Curies at length, selecting and arranging their words to allow these two long-deceased lovers to tell their story. The overlapping dialogue provides a vivid portrait of a relationship built not only upon love, but upon a shared passion for science:

MARIE: “He caught the habit of speaking to me of his dream of an existence consecrated entirely to scientific research, and asked me to share that life.”

PIERRE: “It would, nevertheless, be a fine thing . . . to pass our lives near each other, hypnotized by our dreams, your patriotic dream, our humanitarian dream, and our scientific dream.”

The second part of Radioactive occupies nearly four times as many pages as the first. It concerns the repercussions of the Curies’ research and the latter half of their relationship, which ends tragically with Pierre’s death. As one may expect, this marks a significant shift in the book. Suddenly, Marie is left to juggle multiple roles alone: mother, professor, Nobel Prize-winning scientist. Her later research and subsequent affair with another scientist—and interestingly, the work and relationships of her children—occupy significant space in the latter part of the narrative.

Throughout the book, Redniss’s own writing style takes a backseat to story. Her straightforward voice mingles with those of her subjects, a pleasant contrast to the lyrical quality of the quotes:

After four years of steady labor, four hundred tons of water, and forty tons of corrosive chemicals, on March 28, 1902, they managed to extract one tenth of a gram of radium chloride.

MARIE: “I shall never be able to express the joy of the untroubled quietness of this atmosphere of research and the excitement of actual progress.”

With the constant companionship that accompanied their research, the Curies’ love deepened. They cosigned their published findings. Their handwritings intermingle in their notebooks. On the cover of one black canvas laboratory log, the initials ‘M’ and ‘P’ are scripted one atop the other.

Aside from directly chronicling the Curies’ history, Redniss relates radioactivity to period developments such as the X-ray, spiritualism, and Art Nouveau. She also makes frequent leaps forward in time to visit the contemporary uses (and misuses) of radiation: a boy being treated for cancer, the bombing of Hiroshima, the accidents at Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, the technology needed to protect and dispose of nuclear materials. The majority of these cutaways worked quite well, though some felt a little too abrupt and even tedious compared to the main plotline.

And amidst all of this, supporting and enhancing the narrative, is the art. Redniss’s drawings are unearthly, eye-catching, and faintly grotesque. This is “a tale of love and fallout,” after all, so the oversized eyes and curving limbs and strangely delicate hands suit Radioactive’s inherent strangeness. Redniss also used a process called “cyanotyping” to give some of the images a beautifully surreal, luminous appearance, like a negative image lit from beneath. Yet, I often stopped reading to wonder: “Who is that man, and why does he have three eyes, two noses, and two mouths? What is this mass of green and yellow meant to signify? . . . And why is that person suddenly naked?”

Color, text placement/shape, and the use of empty space also affect the reading experience in Radioactive. In the black and while illustrations at the beginning of the book, Pierre’s story occupies the left-hand pages, while Marie’s occupies the right. When they meet, this pattern starts to dissolve; their quotes are placed on the same pages, and they begin appearing in color illustrations together. This is a clever gesture to how Pierre and Marie’s lives ran parallel to one another before finally veering into a relationship.  And the chapter’s name? “Symmetry.”

While much of Radioactive is illustrated by Redniss’s own hand, she also includes copies of historical documents and photographs. More of the latter would have been a welcome addition to this book, as there are only three realistic renderings of Marie in the book, and none of Pierre. (While the book’s subtitle gives them equal billing, Radioactive offers more attention to Mme. Curie. Every chapter opens with a quote from her; two pages are dedicated to listing “luminaries, flora and fauna” of Poland, her homeland; she is the one illustrated on the cover. This imbalance isn’t too much of a problem, as Marie’s experiences are textured enough to fill these rich pages.)

Page by page, this book confronts traditional notions of what nonfiction “should be” and what the form can accomplish. By challenging the boundaries of its medium, Radioactive doesn’t just leave its reader looking forward to Redniss’s future material, but also the works that it might inspire other artists to create—a fitting outcome for a story about discovery and transformation.

Maria Sholtis is a nonfiction MFA candidate at the University of Pittsburgh. Follow her on Twitter here.

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On the Rollercoaster

Open any of Bob Hicok’s collections, and I suspect you’ll be dazzled by poems plumbing the depths of the self as they skim the fascinating, frustrating surface of contemporary American life. Using a neo-surrealist net to capture heart, humor, and the sublime in one cast, Hicok’s best poems do not merely entertain—they teach my mind to function in patterns I can only call Hicok-esque for at least an hour or so after I’ve put them down. In an intimate, chatty tone, I find myself prone to narrating my thoughts to myself, often surprised by whip-smart connections between the observed world and my mind’s internal workings that I suspect Hicok’s poems have trained me to make. Pun, sarcasm, retort, leaps of logic that at times assume mystical proportions meet the absurdities of a morning’s passage through a subway station or a trip to the market. As the effect fades, I know I’ve experienced the full power of what Elizabeth Bishop termed the “mind in motion.” I know it’s what I expect out of poetry.

Winner of the 2008 Bobbitt Prize, This Clumsy Living (2007) stands out among Hicok’s books. Balancing craft at the level of both the individual poem and the book is a hard-won achievement for any poet, but it is particularly gratifying to see a poet of prodigious strength one-up himself. Where Hicok’s earlier books were less adept at organizing his bountiful energies into a coherent emotional arc, This Clumsy Living succeeds beautifully—perhaps, in part, by beginning with an admission of clumsiness.

A quick read down the Table of Contents shows the oscillation of Hicok’s energies: “The busy days of my nights” abuts “A poem with a poem in its belly” and “Waiting for my foot to ring” with “War story,” all in the mysteriously-titled first section “Twenty-three windows.” Real-world narrative flashes chronicle the speaker’s wrestling with political and social events in everyday life, a drive that springs from the Whitmanian well of “full report,” even as the speaker soothes himself by engineering temporary escape via surreal leaps in time and space that always manage to lead him back to the indelible fact of “this clumsy living.” “If we could solve that equation, we’d be happy,” Hicok poignantly suggests.

Yet, what are the chances of solving such an equation, Hicok’s book seems to ask. In “The New Math,” math is a rhetorical structure Hicok recognizes not only as “strange,” but imperfect. We cannot rest easy with a single solution any more than we can disown our drive to try to reduce our problems. Poetry’s algebra may be a fraught construct, the poem whispers to us, but its process just may deliver a bit of happiness along the tortuous path.

Hicok would probably be the last to say we shouldn’t have fun with either the world, our psychological attempts to diminish loss, or poetry. This Clumsy Living keeps an emotional balance by swinging between extremes of existential terror and a lively absurdist humor. “Her my body,” about the inability of poetic thought to soothe a speaker imagining cancer striking his beloved (“If you are comforted / by this thought you are welcome / to keep it”), is followed by the zany, zippy “The busy days of my nights,” where our speaker meditates on zombie films (“writers struggling with the inbred / mutant Appalachian cannibal dialogue”), and the aforementioned Elizabeth Bishop (“remembered the ladybug / walking across ‘At the Fishhouses’ open on my desk”).

The shifts in tone that occur from poem to poem are well-matched in a greater variety of forms than appear in previous books. Hicok experiments with the lengthy stanza shape typical of his earlier work, a narrative flow eschewing visual pacing (stanza breaks, etc.) in favor of compact density. While individually such an effect is excellent, in a book full of such poems I find myself experiencing the pleasant exhaustion that comes from preparing for the same rollercoaster ride over and over again. Not, per Jerry Seinfeld, that there’s anything wrong with that—Hicok’s earlier work conveyed a sense and vision of his American moment, most notably in terms of the dissolution of the working class in his home state of Michigan and American foreign policy. (May we hope for Hicok’s response to the labor protests earlier this year?)

Hicok also avoids the over-writing afflicting his earlier books, whether as a result of an inability to kill his proverbial darlings or an understandable desire to perform for his usually-rapt audience. Most markedly, the word “which” appears much less frequently. (I say this as one also afflicted by the curse my seventh grade English teacher referred to as “whichery and thattery.”) Ultimately, how could I not be filled with admiration for a poet who manages to write a lovely lyric stanza about shit-eating dogs, thanking deer for their scat at the same time as he is able to turn a discussion of his mother’s morbid obesity into a loving paean to mothering in “Documenting a Decision”?

A fat body resembles a pregnant body, resembles hope, start. ( . . . ) This is more the way of the mother than the father. ( . . . ) This is my prayer: Lord, make me round.

Reading poetry is not only about the pleasure we take in the artifact of a finished poem—it is also about the journey of the poet. This Clumsy Living witnesses a gifted poet taking a leap. Hicok’s neo-surrealist impulse pushes his earnest lyric narrative mode just off-balance, keeping conversational tones from feeling either tired or disingenuous. The poems’ speaker is aware he navigates an imperfect world with imperfect tools, but also sees no other way to go about it—the very essence, perhaps, of Beckett’s “I can’t go on, I’ll go on.” If reading This Clumsy Living feels at times like being on a rollercoaster—emotionally and visually, tonally and metaphorically—through Hicok’s mental countryside, we do well to remember he warned us, and then sit back and enjoy the ride.

Mandy Malloy is a writer and graphic designer currently living in Brooklyn, New York. A graduate of Hunter College’s MFA program and a 2011 Norman Mailer Colony Fellow, her poems have appeared most recently in The Portland Review.

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Publishing Solo is a new monthly blog series focused on topics relating to self-publishing. Its purpose is to provide information and engage conversation amongst both up-and-coming and established writers as we search for new ways to get our work out of that sad desk drawer and into the changing literary world.


We tend to think of self-publishing as a new development, a practice that has cropped up in the past couple of decades. We envision perfect-bound paperback books multiplying in the shadow of publishing conglomerates. But in reality, self-publishing has a long and fairly storied history, whose stars (listed chronologically in order of self-published dates) include: Benjamin Franklin (early to mid-1700’s); Thomas Paine (late 1700’s); Edgar Allan Poe (1827); Henry David Thoreau (mid-1800’s); Walt Whitman (1855); Oscar Wilde (1881); Mark Twain (1885); Zane Grey (1903); Ezra Pound (1908); Carl Sandburg (early 1900’s); Upton Sinclair (early to mid-1900’s); Virginia Woolf (early 1900’s); Gertrude Stein (1914); and D.H. Lawrence (1928); e.e. cummings (1930’s). This is by no means a complete list.

Many of these now literary giants self-published for the same reasons we are doing so today: to combat censorship, to maintain control, and, most commonly, to conquer manuscript rejection.

In the early 1900’s, James Joyce’s seminal work, Ulysses, was faced with rejection from publishers due to page length and obscenity laws. His solution? Collect money from friends, patrons, and fellow writers for pre-orders.

D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterly’s Lover was “privately published” (sounds much more sultry when you put it that way, doesn’t it?) in 1928, thirty-two years before its official publication in Britain.  The reason? Too sexy and too many dirty words.

Mark Twain tired of finicky publishers and paid for the publication of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn himself.

Zane Grey supposedly borrowed money from his wife to launch his book career as the father of the modern western novel (proving, once again, that so many problems can be solved by marrying up).

In 1644, John Milton self-published Areopagitica, a polemical tract arguing in favor of unlicensed printing, saying, “he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself.” Of course, while the freedom to print one’s own work has long been argued for, neither the publishing world nor practices of literary consumption are the same today as they were in the 1600s, 1700s, 1800s, or much of the 1900s.  And yet, while formats and reading practices have changed, the possibility for self-publishing success has not. Here is a look at a few of our more contemporary self-published phenomenon:

The Joy of Cooking, Irma S. Rombauer (1931): Rombauer, a St. Louis, Missouri housewife, wrote this book amidst the emotional and financial devastation following the suicide of her husband in the previous year. Initially she had 3,000 copies printed by A.C. Clayton, a commercial printer of labels for shoes and Listerine. In 1936, The Joy of Cooking was picked up by a standard publisher. Since that time, the book has been in continuous publication, is considered a staple of the modern kitchen, and has having sold over 18 million copies.

What Color is Your Parachute?, Richard Nelson Bolles (1970): One of the most popular texts for job seekers, Bolles originally self-published this book in 1970 before it was picked up commercially by Ten Speed Press in 1972. The book has been revised every year since its original publication and has sold over 10 million copies worldwide.

Real Peace, Richard Nixon (1983): Nixon chose to self-publish this work on geopolitical strategy and the establishment of long-lasting peace. He felt the issues addressed in the work were too timely to wait 18 months for a publishing house to go through its many motions to prepare the book. Little Brown & Co. went on to create the first trade edition in 1984.

The Plant, Stephen King (2000): In March 2000, at King’s request, Simon & Schuster digitally published his novella, Riding the Bullet. According to the NY Times, over 400,000 fans downloaded the text upon its debut, making it the universe’s first mass-market e-book. In July of that same year, King began to digitally self-publish The Plant, a serialized epistolary novel featuring a ferocious vine terrorizing a publishing house. In principle, readers would pay one-dollar per installment, a fee that was monitored by the honor system. However, King did threaten to cease posting installments if the percentage of paying readers fell below the 75% mark. Over the next few months, King fiddled with the pricing and readership faltered. The last installment was published in December, but the book remains unfinished. While King’s attempt to jump-start “Big Publishing’s worst nightmare” has floundered, you’ve got to appreciate his efforts. Of course, the problem could have been the silly content (which, unlike the similarly themed film The Happening, did not feature Mark Wahlberg talking to a plastic plant).

Eragon, Christopher Paolini (2002): Paolini, the wunderkind who began writing his now-famous young-adult fantasy novel at the age of 15, was assisted by his parents in the novel’s self-publication. Subsequently, he and his family spent a year on a promotional tour throughout the United States. While on the tour, Carl Hiassen’s stepson happened to pick up a copy, which he reportedly fell in love with, prompting Hiassen to show the book to an editor at Knopf.  Published by Knopf in 2003, the book became an instant hit, landing Eragon on the NY Times Bestseller List for 26 consecutive weeks. In 2006, Eragon was adapted into a film which garnered $249 million worldwide.

(various), Amanda Hocking (2010-present): Another Paolinian wunderkind, former assisted-living assistant Amanda Hocking wrote 17 novels in her spare time. In 2010, frustrated by the lack of a publishing deal, Hocking began to self-publish her young-adult paranormal romances, which have since been described by the NY Times as “literature as candy, a mash-up of creativity and commerce.” Hocking, a self-proclaimed “unicorn enthusiast” and college dropout, self-published nine novels whose sales exceeded 1 million copies. Despite a low per-copy cost ($.99 to $2.99), Hocking’s books garnered an unprecedented sum—close to $2 million in the first year. Put it another way: in 2011, Hocking was selling 9,000 books per day. That same year, she signed her first conventional contract with St. Martin’s Press for another whopping $2 million dollars.  The decision put self-publishing panelists in a tizzy at last year’s BookExpo America; according to their unofficial (yet sensical) figures, Hocking was on track to make more money by continuing to self-publish.  So why did she do it? In response to her shocked fans, Hocking said: “I’ve done as much with self-publishing as any person can do…I want to be a writer. I do not want to spend 40 hours a week handling e-mails, formatting covers, finding editors, etc. Right now, being me is a full-time corporation.”

Now—don’t get too excited. Success stories like Hocking and Paolini are few and far between. In the same way that traditional publishing rarely turns a profit or creates a superstar, self-published authors rarely become household names. But what do all successful self-published works have in common? The author’s belief in the validity of their work; a willingness to fund, promote and produce one’s own work; and the drive to get the book out into the wide, wide world.

The moral? If you’re willing to work hard—to be your own corporation—you have a much better chance of success. If you’re willing to work hard and you have talent, your chances are that much better. With so many options for self-publishing, there really is very little excuse to not take the leap. After all, if you can sell a couple thousand copies on your own, you’ll become much more attractive to gun-shy publishers. And if you can sell 900,000 copies on your own, then, well, you’ve most likely written a paranormal-zombie-vampire-werewolf-romance-literary-snickers-bar. Who am I to judge?


Miss part one of our series? We’ll be taking a blogging break in December to focus on our new issue, but check back in January for the next installment of Publishing Solo.


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The nuance
Of being
Is to
Capture
The
Seed

Norman Mailer, Death of the Ladies

Manwriting is not even about the phallic references, although if you started looking, you could throw together a phallic manwriting tumblr feed faster than you could write “hair down to her fine ass.”

It’s not necessarily about the verbal sizing-up and branding of women with monikers  – “blondie,” “lady,” “chick” “sweet-eyed insert-your-belittling term of affection”; this might be one indicator, but not the only one, and not even an essential one.

It’s not really either of these things, although it’s undoubtedly more fun to search for explicit cock references than to try and pick up on the distinct swaggering prose, the certain cocked (inevitable, pardon me) male postures.

With sentences that tend towards the staccato (and that, when they do grow more elaborate, do so not so much to expand and question as to definitively explain or to debunk via detail, to reduce to smirking anecdotes) manwriting is authoritative and conclusive and wise in a let-me-tell-you kind of way. It has it all figured out, and has condensed, simplified, and narrowed the world into the manwriter’s purview. It tucks the emotional and the psychological behind the self-deprecating, the overtly macho, and the sardonic. It uses characters like facts to prove a point, or like simplified archetypes to flesh out the author’s comparative fullness and full understanding.

It commands more than it asks; it lectures, in artful but conclusive ways, more than it explores. Listen to Charles Bowden on a beauty queen ravaged by drugs and violence in Ciudad Juárez:

Charles Bowden, Murder City:

I will sit with Miss Sinaloa, and I know I will be mesmerized by the accounts, and she will remain a mystery. Her perfect face will be blank. So will her beautiful eyes cocooned in makeup. By now her hair will have grown out, though I doubt it will cascade to her fine ass. The handprints on her buttocks will have vanished. She will retain nothing but barbed memories of her fine time at the Casablanca when she was doing cocaine and whiskey and then was gang-raped for days. Perhaps she will share with me her memories of the crazy place.

The voice here is beyond questioning; it is decisive and final. It is not just strong (it would be a mistake to confuse “strong” or confident voices with manliness, for the gender stereotypes this implies but also because manwriting is not so much about either strength or confidence but about dominance and attitude): it’s appropriative, taking this woman’s experience and making it the writer’s via a series of “wills.” Her “perfect” face will be blank. Her “beautiful” eyes will be cocooned in makeup. She will retain nothing. Bowden has it figured out. He is telling you how it is. He is telling you how she is. He is telling you what is going to happen and telling you why. He is a man viewing and explaining a woman and a city.

There is no process of inquiry here. There are no fine edges, no hedging or questioning. I know the purpose of Murder City was to act as a lament and a tragic elegy for Ciudad Juárez and what has become of it, but Bowden’s writing in that book is uniformly conclusive and harsh with a repetitive certainty, appropriating whatever it examines, turning it into a tough and unquestionable lecture for the humble reader. Bowden is a sort of lone Western hero coming to town and setting things straight. He is the man shining the bright light of definitive truth on the woman and the city’s experience.

But manwriting doesn’t always have to boom with severity. It can also be falsely disingenuous in a Kerouacian way, jokingly feigning a dumb-guy innocence. Nuanced emotional and psychological realizations are not manly, but they are necessary in literary narratives and in magazine feature stories, so the manwriting way to deal with them is to provide a sort of yo, here I am, just kinda realizing something! self-mockery with plenty of macho asides. Insights have to be pared down to a few pithy yeah-man observations, quickly tempered by irony, humor, and tough-wistful jokes about women.

In Jay Kirk’s story “Hotels Rwanda,” which was selected for the Best American Travel Writing Anthology 2009, the initial suggestion of the story’s larger emotional/psychological theme is couched between ape-y arms and a mountain gorilla being punched in the face.

Jay Kirk, Hotels Rwanda:

He put an arm between the front seats of the Land Rover so we could see for ourselves. Ernest and I agreed: His arms looked ape-y. One expected to be changed by travel; one looked for little symptoms in oneself, signs of alteration, but did this count as a valid transformation? Ernest had never heard of such a thing. Once, he’d had a client who’d come all the way from Australia just to punch a mountain gorilla in the face, but nothing quite like this.

Devon Friedman, in his piece “Will You Be My Black Friend?” has to go so far as wanting to punch himself in the face after admitting that he does yoga. The story’s central question here, about if and how to breach the easy insularity of a particular lifestyle shaped by class and race, gets framed as a comic confessional, culminating with the punch.

Devon Friedman, Will You Be My Black Friend?:

I had a cocktail party the other night. A natural moment to look around at the demographics of your life. And I thought: Jesus Christ, there are a lot of white people in this room. I’ve always thought of the whiteness of my adult life as a temporary condition. Like somehow all these white people have been foisted on me; pretty soon it’ll change; it’s probably my wife’s fault. But it’s time to acknowledge that I’ve become a character in a Wes Anderson movie. I wear white tennis sneakers from the ’70s. I listen to ambient music. I have dinner parties where I serve Spanish rosé and this softer version of mozzarella that has a lovely, almost liquid center that you can only get at the Italian import store. I do yoga, and I get excited when it’s ramp season. Sometimes I’d really like to punch myself in the face.

Manwriting gathers credibility with macho anecdotes, buffering larger spiritual or sociological insights – like Karl Taro Greenfield’s observation about the hope and squalor in “the seedy rooms used to plot a thousand getaways” in “Hope and Squalor in Chungking Mansion”– behind safari vests and snake’s blood:

Within two hours, we’d fallen in with a Canadian man who described himself as a  “Leftenant-General” and told us he knew where we could get injected with a mixture of one part snake’s blood and one part Demerol.

“Wouldn’t that kill us?” we asked.

“Demorol?”

The Leftenant-General shook his head. “Best painkiller in the world.”

“No, the snake’s blood.”

“Hasn’t done so yet,” he assured us, thumping the chest of his safari vest.”

“Hope and Squalor in Chungking Mansion” was also anthologized in Best American Travel Writing. It has become de rigeur, particularly in mainstream magazine feature writing – The New Yorker, Harper’s, GQ, Esquire, and the handful of other places whose writing is routinely anthologized – to conceal or burrow what could be seen as sentimental or heavy or emotional ideas beneath a very male and often very hipster (i.e., ironic, sardonic, above-it-all, postmodern) posturing.

Here’s Lawrence Osborne in “A Pilgrimage of Sin: Bombs, Booze and Hookers in Islamic Thailand”, published in Harper’s:

My new friends seemed to find the mixture of religious kitcsch and merry whoredom as irresistibly seductive as it was incongruous. In the suffocating cocktail lounge, we compared our phallus-shaped plastic room keys decorated with the words HOT PINK, and I was taught a few useful words of Malay: “Cock” is burung.

Osborne gets at his discussion of terrorism and prostitution in Thailand via this veneer of manly, detached derision.

Yet manwriting doesn’t always have to come with snark. Often it can come across as that one-sided conversation you have at a party with a guy who cuts off your sentences to clarify your point for you, and leaves a pause between conclusions just long enough for you to meekly agree before he’s telling you how it is again.

Paul Theroux, Riding The Iron Rooster:

“I’ve seen you on television, the woman said. “Haven’t I?”

“Probably,” I said, and told her my name.

“Amazing,” she said. “My sister won’t believe this – she’s read all your books.”

Her name was Rachel Tickler, and I found it a relief to tell her I was on my way to Mongolia and then China – yes, to do some writing – and that I had just come from London. What was that about the States? Oh, yes, I did spend part of the year on the Cape – yes, it’s a wonderful place.

…I told her everything, I bought her some tea and we sat up so late that I could be confessional…it did me a lot of good to tell her these things, because I had been so secretive on the tour it was like being invisible…

…In one sense we were like an adulterous couple – or more accurately it was like a one-night stand. It was tender and I was eager to be candid, and she was a good listener.

The puffed male ego is a particularly insidious and central feature of Theroux’s writing, but also indicative of a wider category of travel manwriting in which all other characters orbit around the man and his virility, his ego, the fascinating aura he exudes. Travel writers in general have a tendency to focus on the wonder and awe they invoke the world over, but manwriting – particularly Theroux’s stimulated one-sided conversation above, in which the woman’s voice is excluded and we hear only Theroux’s indulgent responses – takes it to a new level. Observe below how Edward Abbey quickly becomes the center of attention in a scruffy Western bar, setting himself apart as the wise other, the “superior” WASP observer, quickly becoming the focus of attention and the center of both fraternal male envy and female desire.

“You like my girl?” the large fellow said. He was a Mexican, a Chicano, with round, brown, solemn face, dark eyes, the shoulders of a fullback. A Mexican but a big Mexican.

“Now, primo…” the woman began.

“You like her, eh?” The dark eyes were aimed at me – not at the wall, not at the mirror, not at the other guy.

I knew he probably carried a knife, a switchblade. All cholos carry switchblades, everybody knows that. The trouble was he was so big, and ugly, and mean, he wouldn’t need a knife. My sole weapon was my superior WASP intelligence. Which only functions, however, in retrospection.

“I’m never getting out of here alive, I said, to myself but aloud. Primo laughed, gripped my shoulder in his enormous paw, and said, “You’re right, man. You’re not. Better buy us a drink.”

Under the volcano. I was glad to buy time by buying Primo and his Blondie each a drink. Bar buddies. He called me Grizzly Adams; I called him Pachuco.

This category of manwriting, while still central to the travel writing paradigm, has been somewhat overshadowed by the sly and neurotic machismo of gonzo journalism. Instead of emphasizing a barrel-chested ladies man, the latter manwriting takes on the guise of the pseudo self-deprecating Thompson-esque bender: the sinewy journalist recounting his or her feral adventures buying AK-47’s in Kurdistan or running with bounty hunters in Hong Kong, man it was totally f*ed up and I spent forty-eight hours vomiting and then hopped into a handhewn canoe to go down the river with a pig and six crazy barenaked tribesman rocking some badass bows and arrows….We’re meant to think not of smooth Abbey or strutting Theroux but of a wiry VICE photographer or wannabe Kerouac scribbling his red-blooded adventures offhand amidst rebels and prostitutes.

Thus the posture has perhaps shifted from the distinctly macho – one of the best Theroux man-lines is his description of Indians in Uganda “airing their women and letting their children run” – to the squirrely, gonzo macho, but manwriting follows the same patterns, tending towards the detached and the all-knowing: all the other poor dopes in the story are taking things seriously, and the manwriters alone can see, with a prim or poignant or disaffected and derisive but unfailingly erudite distance, the truth of the matter. Keruouc perfected this:

“Marylou was a pretty blonde with immense ringlets of hair like a sea of golden tresses; she sat there on the edge of the couch with her hands hanging in her lap and her smoky blue country eyes fixed in a wide stare because she was in an evil gray New York pad that she’d heard about back West, and waiting like a longbodied emaciated Modigliani surrealist woman in a serious room. But outside of being a sweet little girl, she was awfully dumb and capable of doing horrible things.”

Manwriting’s descriptions are constantly, slyly and definitively placing the writer a cut above the described, which seems like a disingenuous thing to say because most nonfiction writers’ descriptions inherently place them a cut above their subjects (writing is an aggressive act, according to Joan Didion, who is incidentally the first writer brought up whenever one mentions the predominance of manwriting in the MFA classroom: “But what about Joan Didion?”), but in the case of manwriting there is a particular, cool, smirking superior male edge. Marylou is a “sweet little girl” and her “smoky blue country eyes” are “fixed in a wide stare.”

It is as if, described in manwriting, characters are simmered down in a reduction of the writer’s own coolness. This is nowhere more obvious than in Colson Whitehead’s “The Republic of Anhedonia,” written for Grantland:

There was one woman at the table, a quiet 60-something lady with bright red hair, the follicles of which it was perhaps possible to count. Five percent of commercially available hair dyes actually match a color that occurs in nature. Hers was not one of them. I liked her.

If Methy Mike had been hitched, the lady had packed her bags long ago, and if they had spawned, their parenting goals probably ended with making sure their kid did not get a tattoo on her face, and they did not always succeed.

For three years I was cursed with sitting down in the exact wrong seat at group dinners. Wholly and inescapably hexed. Adjacent to a blowhard lush, between two narcissistic twerps, face to face with the mime. You look at what you’ve been dealt and think, This will end badly, and check out of the convo and endure until next time.

In Whitehead this reduction of characters to stereotypes is supposed to be sardonic, tongue-in-cheek, and we’re meant to understand that Whitehead is aware of this reductionism as he’s writing, but ultimately his and our meta awareness of the tactic being employed doesn’t make it any less macho or cloyingly self-infatuated. Ultimately, the effect is one of placing the hip male writer at the center of a universe of one-dimensional stereotypical characters who serve as sounding boards for the writer’s all-knowing intelligence, for the writer’s ego and quest. They are not so much people as they are opportunities for the writer to play around, to make a wry point. They’re bemusing, they’re sweet, they’re ridiculous, they’re bumpkins, but they’re never really foils for the male narrator, never up to his level.

This reductionism can also come via silence. John D’Agata is the master of this technique, the lyric use of extremely sparse and staccato language to convey a concept, and to reduce characters almost to symbols. D’Agata admits he uses composite characters, and while this generally doesn’t violate my personal nonfiction ethics in his case I think it is indicative of a larger tendency to treat characters as mere representations of an idea, or as amusing anecdotes. In About a Mountain he writes:

As we drove toward the mountain in the white Jeep that day, two black jets in the distance sped by. They swept low against the desert. Then each dropped a bomb.

“Fuck yeah,” said a guard as we paralleled the explosions.

“Fuckin’ A,” said the other.

A fascination with how the world will end is not particularly new.

It is almost bullying in its composition of the facts, in its descriptions and juxtapositions. It is curt, cutting and precise, not giving a single character more than an incisive line that definitively sums him up. D’Agata uses characters the same way he uses facts: as things to play around with to get at an idea he’s developing. His writing is all the more imposing for the faux diffidence of its understatement and its silences.

Finally, there’s the straight-up manly strut, about which there’s not much more to say than, Hey, there’s a man in this prose!

Whitehead:

I realized I hadn’t told anyone where I was going, some real hobo shit.

“How many chips do you have?” I started hearing that a lot more, this locker room check: Who has the bigger dick?”

And of course, Mailer:

Definition of a lady
She grasps
the root
While kissing
The bud

Definition of a hero
He
Thrives
In
Dikes

People always ask, when the subject of manwriting comes up – as it has quite often recently in the preparation of this article – “What about women writing?” and they give examples of cuddly afternoons of gingerbread cookies and sisterly bonding, of relationship triumphs and grumpy dads weeping at graduation ceremonies and my response is, “Yeah, but that stuff doesn’t end up in Harper’s. Or GQ, or The New Yorker, or the mainstream publications.”

But manwriting does. It’s not considered manwriting like a syrupy Ladies Home Journal article about redemption through gardening is considered women’s writing. It’s just the norm.

So if you’re a woman writer, or rather, a writer who happens to be a woman, wouldn’t it frustrate you that manwriting is simply equated with the normative standard of intelligence, of insight, of style; that “Who has the bigger dick?” isn’t a question reserved for some marginalized men’s mag (because let’s face it, men’s magazines – GQ, Esquire, Outside – are part of the literary mainstream while women’s mags are out there in fluffland) but rather a normal question at the center of the literary scene; wouldn’t it frustrate you that even though perhaps you’d like to be told how it is by a woman from time to time, only 21% of articles in Harper’s, only 16% of articles The New Republic, only 14% of articles in The New York Review of Books, only 35% of features in The Paris Review, only 26% of articles in The New Yorker, are written by women?

I’m not suggesting some sort of feminist attack here, a banning of phallic references or a cry for real heartfelt emotions from our nation’s male writers but rather, a touch of perspective – so often, what we take for granted as writing, as feature writing, as magazine writing, as the literary writing of our generation, is manwriting, and what does that mean?

Where does that leave us?

Caught with our dicks hanging out?

Or maybe, perhaps, we can think of a better metaphor.


Sarah Menkedick is a nonfiction MFA student at The University of Pittsburgh. Her writing has been published on Amazon’s Kindle Singles, World Hum, qarrtsiluni, Perceptive Travel, and a number of other online and print publications, and she is the founder of velamag.com, an online magazine of travel writing by women.


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Personal Folklore

“Everything necessary to understand my grandfather,” says Natalia Stefanovi, the narrator of Téa Obreht’s debut novel The Tiger’s Wife, “lies between two stories: the story of the tiger’s wife and the story of the deathless man” (32).

Though narrated by Natalia, the novel’s true protagonist is her grandfather, a respected physician who has just passed away in a remote village in the former Yugoslavia. Natalia, a newly graduated doctor, is on a humanitarian mission to vaccinate orphans in nearby Brejevina, just across the border. (Natalia takes pains, in light of the still-fresh wounds of the Balkan conflicts, to leave nations and ethnic identities undefined: “Twelve years ago, before the war, the people of Brejevina had been our people,” she writes. “The border had been a joke” (15).) Natalia’s present-day tale gives the novel its overarching frame, while her grandfather’s two interwoven stories provide The Tiger’s Wife with a rich, folkloric atmosphere.

In the story of the deathless man, Natalia recounts her grandfather’s tales of a series of encounters with Gavran Gailé, who claims to have been cursed with the inability to die. Gailé appears for the last time on the eve of a massive bombing campaign, a harbinger of the wave of destruction to come. The deathless man challenges everything the grandfather has based his medical career upon, hinting at the presence of a world beyond what can be observed scientifically.

The grandfather’s other story concerns a freed tiger that haunted his boyhood village over the course of a punishing winter, and the local butcher’s wife who fell in love with the creature. The woman, deaf and mute in addition to being a “Mohammedan” brought back to the village by the butcher, is mistrusted by the villagers as an outsider. Her connection to the tiger, which she draws to the smokehouse with offerings of meat, thrills and fascinates the boy, who is already obsessed with the exotic images of the tiger Shere Khan in The Jungle Book (a recurring touchstone throughout The Tiger’s Wife). He watches in dismay as the villagers hunt the tiger, a clear symbol of their fears of the world outside their village.

The two tales, braided around Natalia’s present-day story, come together brilliantly in the novel’s third act. Gavran Gailé refuses to remain a mere piece of folklore from the past, as Natalia has her own encounter with him. Obreht pans out from the story of the villagers’ panic over the tiger to describe an isolated place cursed by history. The episode with the tiger “became the unifying memory that carried them into the spring, through the arrival of the Germans with their trucks, and later their railroad, which the villagers were made to build; and finally the train, the rattle and cough of the tracks that pulled them awake at night (every time they thought don’t stop here, don’t stop) . . .” (337).

War pervades The Tiger’s Wife without quite appearing on the page, at least not for long. When Natalia recounts her teenage years, spent flaunting imminent bombings by staying out all night with her friends, the war itself remains a distant rumor, a constant threat of obliteration that arrives only after the city’s residents have begun to dismiss it. Obreht wrings more pathos from the war by describing its effects on the distressed and starving inhabitants of the city’s zoo than by showing the bombs falling:

“[F]or weeks and weeks after the bombing ended, Zbogom the tiger continued to eat his own legs. He was docile, tame, to the keepers, but savage on himself, and they would sit in the cage with him, stroking the big square block of his head while he gnawed on the stumps of his legs. The wounds were infected, swollen, and black” (302).

The Tiger’s Wife overflows with stories, evoking a land rich in complex, contentious history, with unclear boundaries between the personal and the political, the historic and the mythological. The grandfather’s tales span two transformative wars, describing a nation ripped from peaceful isolation into uneasy modernity. His stories, on their face the stuff of tall tales told to children, are as relevant to the future of this region’s people as the day’s current events.

Obreht writes in a strong, clear prose style that’s well-suited to the folkloric quality of much of the novel. The book’s only real weakness is the more rushed, less distinguished prose in much of the present-day thread; Natalia seems relatively less substantial, less distinguished, set against the deathless man and the tiger’s wife.

Still, it’s a forgivable lapse: Obreht seems to have too many good, old stories to tell, too many compelling legends to share, to linger for too long in the present.

Adam Reger is a graduate of the University of Pittsburgh’s MFA program in fiction. He is the author of U.S. Navy Pirate Combat Skills.

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A Man Who Says No

An Algerian born working class Nobel laureate, Camus wrote fiction, plays, essays, and speeches. And he looked all the world like Humphrey Bogart. In The Rebel he asks: how can one respond to the experience of absurdity, without turning to nihilism and suicide, or the tyranny and murder that too often follows revolution? Assuming rebellion is “an essential dimension of human experience”, Camus examines how the rebel should act, and what the terms and consequences would be of that action. He considered this book-length essay a counterpart to his celebrated Myth of Sisyphus, and in it he takes on the massive concepts of value, freedom, and justice. Like the rebel, his method is provisional—and necessarily so. He progresses by associative leaps, metaphors, and delicate particulars.

Camus begins by describing a certain kind of rebel whose impetus is the experience of outraged innocence, an insulted sense of dignity: the feeling that something has “gone on too long” or someone has “gone too far”. Rather than respond destructively or try to replace what oppresses him, this person “pleads for life, undertakes to struggle against servitude, falsehood, and terror.” In this sense the rebel is unlike the heretics (“evil, be thou my good”) and the radical leaders (“we must force them to be free”) who set themselves on the level of their enemies regardless of consequence and “side only with themselves”. After sketching the characteristics of the ideal rebel, epitomized by none other than Ivan Karamozov, Camus establishes a genealogy of those who thought and acted in response to the metaphysical demands of their times. He moves from Sade to Baudelaire and the “dandies”, to Stimer, Nietzsche, Lautreamont, and the surrealists. His observations about these men and the aesthetics that guided them are full of critical admiration special to those who study out of love and necessity.

“More a writer than a philosopher.” — Advisor’s note on Camus’ dissertation

The latter part of the essay sketches a history of rebellion by surveying the stages of the French revolution, then turns to rebellion and the act of artistic creation. The artist refuses the salvific myths of otherwordly justification, even of social or political progress towards an ideal state. The artist makes this refusal in favor of adapting and stylizing the experience ready at hand on its own terms, creating a world out of and within this one. In the closing section, Thought at the Meridian, Camus draws on all of his stylistic powers in a statement of determination and encouragement. Facing and accepting limits is his strongest advice for rebels who refuse to assimilate the characteristics of those they stand against: “The revolutionary mind, if it wants to remain alive, must therefore return again to the sources of rebellion and draw its inspiration from the only system of thought which is faithful to its origins: thought that recognizes limits.” This sense of measure offers a treatment for the malady of nihilism, and an alternative code of action for the rebel.

After its publication in 1952, (he had just recovered from a relapse of tuberculosis), most of the French intellectual circle would have nothing to do with him. Sartre’s main complaint was Camus’ rejection of Marxist-Leninism—the kind of political action that he had found imperative as a responsible thinker. There was a big fuss about The Rebel’s wrongs and weaknesses. Camus not only lacked large-scale political strategies, he lacked a systematic understanding of many of his sources. More than that he lacked a logically stable method of argument. In The Philosophical Review, David Sachs spoke for a significant group of critics when he observed of The Rebel that “claims are made in the name of logic, but where ‘logic’ occurs, it sometimes would be better to read ‘tendency’ or ‘drift’…Camus gives the impression of employing a procedure and reaching a conclusion more original and profound than in fact they are”. He wasn’t playing by the rules.

It may be possible to read Camus’ “drift” more generously—as a method adopted not out of laziness or ineptitude, but as an extension of his concern with rebellion. This long essay evidences a conceptual and expressive refusal to capitulate, not only to political ideologies, but to conventional modes of inquiry, a generic regime, or as Sachs puts it, “procedure”. The mode of reasoning Camus refuses (or fails) to participate in prescribes how a good thinker thinks. Modeled after god himself, a voice in the dark void of the universe, conventional reasoning predisposes its participants to singular positions and enforceable claims. Linear, not addressing what it deems irrelevant or unworthy, its power is brutally formulaic, predictable, and closed. Any interlocution is highly manipulated. As revolutions end in oppression, so conventional reasoning perpetuates reductionism under the myth of an ideal language for thought.

Camus takes issue with the premise of universal reasonability in The Rebel and elsewhere. For him, people are reasonable but the world is not. This gap is what interests him. And it is reason in the face of its disastrous context—the experience of the absurd, the mind against its limits, the conditions of life—that Camus engages. Drowning men don’t dance. Even if it were possible it would be unbefitting. Many a professor has smiled with tender condescension at the tattered works of Camus stuffed in the pockets of their students. But those who marginalize Camus as a “good writer but messy thinker” may be missing his true value. His insistence endears; his prose addresses the senses and emotions as well as the intellect. His ideas make sense on their own terms and his methodology, while provisional and limited, has integrity to his subject rare even in those who think clearly.

Andrea Applebee lives in Philadelphia and teaches at the University of Pennsylvania.

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Publishing Solo is a new monthly blog series focused on topics relating to self-publishing. Its purpose is to provide information and engage conversation amongst both up-and-coming and established writers as we search for new ways to get our work out of that sad desk drawer and into the changing literary world.


Unless you’re a toddler who has handled an e-reader since the age of 4 (ahem, my nephew) or the offspring of publishing trailblazers Richard Nash and Jason Epstein (show me that baby!), chances are good that you’re still clinging to traditional publishing methods. You may not want to. You may deny it. But somewhere, deep inside, most writers want The Traditional Route—from your hands to an agent to a publisher to the shelves. Follow it up with a book tour, maybe a prize, some acclaim, an interview on NPR’s Fresh Air, and massive sales (or, you know, a small but respected audience, if you’re into that sort of thing).

Beyond tradition, what is it that is so alluring about this model?  We live in an era where we embrace a constant stream of new media, a DIY culture of personal websites, YouTube videos, blogs, and social networking tools. We’ve become steeped in self-promotion. We’ve been presented with a bevy of self-publishing options, from total publishing packages, provided by such outfits as BookPros, to online print-on-demand platforms, such as Lulu, Amazon’s CreateSpace, and Xlibris. If you’re lucky, you may even find yourself in a retail store with an Espresso Book Machine, where you can literally watch your book being made in seven minutes. Yet we continue to pine for an outdated system.

I’ll admit it. I’m as guilty as the next person. And the things I want from traditional publishing are pretty much the same things most people want.

I want to be chosen. I want to rise above the slush pile, to be told my work is worth it, really worth it, by some discerning editorial eye. I don’t want my mother’s “it’s really lovely, honey” and I don’t want my workshop’s carefully neutralized critique, adhering to the prescribed ratio of “3 good things to 1 constructive comment.”  I want my work to be so good, damn it, that I am worth 55 lb. crème paper, a jacketed hard cover, and a paperback reprint. Perhaps this would quell, once and for all, that hideously stereotypical downward spiral of “my work sucks, I suck, everyone hates me.” Wail, wail.

I want someone to do the work for me. Let’s say I’ve written a book. I’ve nursed it, cursed at it, rewritten it, and repeated this cycle a few million times. For so many months or years, it’s been my baby. And now that it’s out of the cute phase, I want someone else to take care of it. I want a publisher who will connect me with an editor, develop a marketing plan, design a dashing cover, print a few thousand copies, and then sell them all.

I want to get paid. Self-publishing involves money upfront—not necessarily a lot, but you’ve got to pay something to have your book produced. In the traditional model, I don’t put money upfront. I am given money. That’s simplifying things, certainly, but you get the general idea. The publisher breaks down and tracks the financial details, determines the profit or loss margins, and alters all those adjacent elements—production, distribution, marketing—accordingly. While self-publishing often yields a higher percentage of profit per book, it also forces the writer to take charge of the financials. Personally, I happen to like a nicely formatted, auto-equating Excel spreadsheet. But this does not make me business savvy.

I want respect. If you have a book, people inevitably ask “what is it about?” But that isn’t what they really want to know—they want to know if it’s any good. If you have an agent, people want to know if they’re with a prestigious agency and what famous writers they’ve represented. And if you actually publish your book, people want to know who that publisher is. If it’s one of the Six Sisters—Random House, Penguin Putnam, HarperCollins, Time Warner, Simon & Schuster, Holtzbrinck Publishing Holdings (whose subsidiaries include Farrar, Straus and Giroux, St. Martin’s Press, and Macmillan, amongst others)—nearly anyone will be wide-eyed and congratulatory. If it’s one of the world’s 85,000-ish small presses, the response is a tad bit different. Certain small presses have achieved a particular renown—Graywolf, Fence Books, and Nightboat come to mind. In these instances, select people will be dutifully impressed. If it’s a press that isn’t immediately recognizable, you’ll get the smile and nod. Then you’ll begin the justifications—a litany of the press’ attributes, successes, blah blah blah.

I could go on, but these are the issues that repeatedly come to the forefront whenever I consider what I should do with that manuscript fermenting on my hard-drive.

One would imagine that I, of all people, would not be so stubbornly hung up on The Traditional Route. After all, I do work in the self-publishing industry. I have seen firsthand some of the extraordinary benefits of forgoing a standard publisher. The economy of production and costs can have enormous benefits to the writer, the person purchasing the book, and the environment. Self-publishing can also be a valuable stepping stone to dealing with a traditional publisher. Perhaps most importantly, I’ve seen manuscripts that would not have otherwise seen the light of day put into the hands of people who have truly enjoyed them.

Let’s face facts. If you’re hung up on snagging a deal with a major publisher and you’re not Snooki in the throes of her 15 minutes of hyper-fame, you’ve got a tempestuous road ahead of you. Because of declines in book sales, the turbulent economy, and rise of the digital, major publishers are placing their bets on celebrity works and established authors. At the DIY Authors Conference at BookExpo America this past year, many significant panelists pointed out that the number of debut novels picked up by conglomerate publishers has dwindled considerably in the last few decades. There is perhaps no better time to consider alternate publishing methods.

Keep in mind that at a time when statistics are stacked against you, self-publishing does not necessarily signify a lack of talent or ability. In a sense, it returns the focus to the most important aspect of publishing—making the work publicly available. It’s worthwhile to consider your stubborn reasons for sticking with the traditional publishing model. Doing so pinpoints what you want out of publication and provides focal points and goals for your first self-publishing endeavor.


Up next month: self-publishing success stories.


Beth Steidle is a recent graduate of the MFA program at the University of Pittsburgh. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Drunken Boat, DIAGRAM, and numerous print anthologies. She is currently employed as the first Self-Publishing Coordinator at the University of Pittsburgh Book Center, where she operates an Espresso Book Machine. Mostly she loves this machine. Sometimes she feels like kicking it.


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