Our bodies want more than they get, our hearts are beehives, we wish you hadn’t ever left, we still shit. We are glad you still exist and were there with us for a time. The tide goes in and the tide goes out and when you order a pizza online from Domino’s you can track it, like your pizza exists in its own personal Vin Diesel movie. We are a character in Golden Eye, and in order to complete our mission we have to become several tiny banquets for a retired janitor who managed to keep three floors of a building cleaner than we will ever be able to keep our own heart, and that is just fine. Pabst keeps making its Blue Ribbon winning beer, and there is no danger of a dearth. The world turns. Our heart beats. The birds fly south, and tomorrow will be near Kentucky.

This is the world of Daniel Bailey’s book of poems The Drunk Sonnets.

And in the world of The Drunk Sonnets it is always shark week.

And like shark week, there is danger. There is commercial interruption. It is not shark week without several shots of sharks not eating the shit out of some man flesh. And it is not shark week without several shots of sharks just sitting there and growing more teeth and not drowning. Because shark week is more than Jaws.

In The Drunk Sonnets there were poems that I thought were maybe flawed, maybe a little too sobby, maybe a little too self-indulgent. This was also me pretending that these things never happened to me. That I never got sad and I never got drunk and I never said things that I hoped no one ever remembered. That I have never been drunk near a computer or cell phone. With this book Daniel Bailey reminded me of something I try sometimes to forget.

It consists of sonnets. A sonnet, typically, is composed of an octet (eight lines) and a sestet (six lines). During the sestet comes what is known as the turn, which is the point in which the direction of the poems changes. For the most part the poems stick to this, using two quatrain and two tersets. There is, within the sonnet tradition, a history of sonnet cycles, such as Sir Phillip Sydney’s Astrophel and Stella, and a history of dealing with love, but a sort of love that we don’t always get. It is written in all caps. I am sure that some people will think this is silly, or a gimmick, but I feel that putting these poems in anything other than all caps would take away from the overall experience. Whenever I have been drunk, I have tended to get louder and louder. This is part of my drunk experience.

A Best of Fence: The First 9 Years, Volume 2

“Survival Depends of Flexibility,” An Argument For The Bendable Straw:

In September of 1937, Joseph Bernard Friedman was issued patent number 2,094,268 for his invention of the ‘Drinking Tube.’  Friedman describes this tiny harbinger of consumer culture as such in the opening of his patent proposal:

“My invention relates to drinking tubes and more particularly to that type of drinking tube known in the trade as a “soda straw” which, while sometimes actually made from a straw, is usually wound or otherwise formed from oiled paper, paraffin paper, Cellophane, or the like. The main object of my invention is to provide a soda straw or similar drinking tube with a flexible section so positioned that the tube may be bent during use without substantially reducing the diameter of the straw.”

The flexible section to which Friedman refers went on to be coined the “living hinge.”  I was struck by the evocativeness of this term when seeking a way to best capture the scope of the new A Best of Fence, The First 9 Years, Volume II, Fiction & Nonfiction, edited by founder, Rebecca Wolff.  How does one reduce to its essence a retrospective whose driving purpose is to reflect “an intentional engine of dissimilarity?”  To start, the collection is as encyclopedic as it is exhilarating.  I imagine it requires a raucous optimism to collect an anthology which not only spans nine years, but seeks to create a multi-vocal retrospective with internalized sections curated by various prominent editors whose visions have collided/colluded/conflicted/ignited over the life of the publication.  What emerges from this firestorm is almost viciously pleasurable, an anthology which reflects the “collective and nearly Catholic approach” of a magazine whose aesthetic purpose from the start was to provide “a reliable home for the fence-sitters,” those works which in fact “resisted easy definition.”(Fence Manifesto 1997)   As Wolff herself says, “Fence has never been a product of solidarity, aesthetic or otherwise.”  “In fact, the editing of Fence is now and always has been multipart, providential, cacophonous.”  Reading the collection felt a bit akin to my experience of the latest Agnes Varda film, Les plages d’Agnès, a retrospective of her life’s work as a leader of the French New Wave:  The collection is founded on the idea of accrual, i.e. the stacking together of stories which carry their own weight and don’t rely on each other for context.  It embraces a stack and build architecture rather than a string and sew.

“Wailing In An Aesthetic Void:”

Since its inception, Fence has functioned as the ambassador of readers.  Opinionated, judicious, discriminating.  It exists in almost-future tense, a tense which is as captivating as it is rigorous.  It remains flexible without reducing its own diameter.  Volume II alone is inimitable, comprised of stories such as Kelly Link’s “Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose,” Sam Lipsyte’s “Feeling Is Not Quite The Word,” and Miranda July’s “The Man On The Stairs” which I’ve loved since the first time I read them.  The collection also housed many personal discoveries, most notably Gary Lutz’s “Her Dear Only Father’s Lone Wife’s Solitudinized, Peaceless Son.”  “Wishing for scientific and technological discoveries or an avant garde to save and advance society is futile,” remarks section editor Lynne Tillman on the desire to categorize various fictional aesthetics, even those fictions which function outside any discernable box.  “Writing is like doing laps without a pool.  Maybe we wail in an aesthetic void or shout in a black hole: life’s empty or dense; we can’t know what we’re in - fish probably don’t know they’re in water (who can be certain though.)”

“Fashioning Tools or Retooling:”

The interesting thing about the “living hinge” is that “the minimal friction and very little wear in such a hinge makes it useful in the design of microelectromechanical systems … These can flex more than a million cycles without failure.”   This is not true apparently for putting together a compelling literary collection.  Here, friction is paramount and consensus is outmoded.  As Jason Zuzga notes in his introduction, “Nonfiction: A Frying Pan,” Fence’s “self-proclaimed mission was to put mainstream and avant-garde poetry in communication, or at least rub them together to create pleasure, discomfort, productive confusion of assumed divisions and productive thwarting of ignorance.”  Plainly put, “Our editors do not agree with one another,” reflects co-section editor Ben Marcus, a sentiment which seems important to note as it gives a nod to the sawing off process, the important aesthetic clarifications that arise after editorial meetings, harbingers of the fragile and imminent need to define just what tools you are seeking to create for your readers.  This too seems to be the concern of this collection, to destabilize (or at the very least defamiliarize) reading, to both satisfy and subvert various readerly expectations.

“Complacency Is The Enemy,” Or “Redundancies as Barometer of Impact:”

The collection is bound together in the grittiest sense, by a determined mission to seek out those voices which exhibit a pressing drive to create inventions out of even the most utilitarian of devices.  There is a blinding urgency to these works, both individually and collectively, which makes them not only salient but solvent.  As Wolff notes in her introduction, “Weird Is An Emotion,” the “most integral editorial function and aim is to find and publish writing that bear’s the mark of the author’s singular impulse - it’s exigency, if you will (and I will).”  What evolves out of this collection exceeds the urgency that we’ve come to expect, and indeed depend upon, from Fence.  From this plurality of aesthetics emerges a virginal sense of emergency.  The thrill of forever starting out.  Upon reading Lethem’s introduction, “Young and Green,” largely a recollection of founding a then renegade magazine -  conjointly thrilling over and slogging through a growing onslaught of blind submissions -  for a moment I was reminded of a scene from a recent Madmen where adman and prototypical New York suit, Don Draper, finds himself holed up at a bar on his lunch break, covetously reading a copy of Frank O’Hara’s newly minted Meditations In An Emergency.  Cliché?  Perhaps.  But not without it’s point: with this anthology, Rebecca Wolff has recognized not only the importance, but the private pleasure, of putting forth stories which continually transcend the ranks.  In Rick Moody’s words, this is an anthology of works which “challenge, confront, arrest,” and in so doing retain an unexpected levity, and in some cases a nearly catholic imperative, even as they age.  As Ben Marcus notes in his introduction, “It’s great and rare when a journal is still around to celebrate its own birthday.”  Cheers to that and many more.

Viking Adult (October 15, 2009)

Maureen Howard has finished her quartet. The Rags of Time is the fourth and final volume of an effort that began with A Lover’s Almanac (1998), followed by Big As Life (2001) and The Silver Screen (2004). These books have been quietly published and quietly read. Their project is large. In a literary landscape that is fast, crowded, and desperate to astonish, Howard’s books offer something else. They are heart-breaking, huge, unsolved, and uncannily close to life.

Howard’s quartet is loosely divided into seasons. A Lover’s Almanac begins the quartet with the framework of winter, and The Rags of Time completes the quartet with the framework of fall. The large cast travels along time’s arrow while negotiating the enigmatic territory of memory. The characters that move in and out of the narrative include: the central couple Artie and Louise, their children, Artie’s father Cyril, his wife Mae, his soulmate Sylvie, Marie Claude and her husband Hans, Joe and Rita Murphy and their mother Isabel, John James Audubon and his wife Lucy, the park-builder Frederick Law Olmstead, the unclassifiable Sissy, the writer Mimi, and many, many more. The characters shift from central to peripheral, or from peripheral to central, as the story’s center shifts and shuffles. Memory and time trade their blows.

The project of memory is not only the story’s project-it’s also the reader’s. Memory tasks the reader twice-once on a personal level, as all stories do, with personal-historical-literary associations. And then again, quite literally-almost physically, in this case. The story is so large, so epic, that this reader, at least, found herself trying to figure out if she had met that character before, or that one? As the story unfolds, associations and intersections (between characters and situations) surface and surprise. I was forced to tap into my reading memory for clues to connections suggested but not confirmed, connections that were perhaps imagined or dreamt instead of intended. For example: by my count, a “Mimi” appears in three of the books, but I do not think it is ever the same Mimi. Another, very different, example: In Big as Life, I was happily reading about a new character when with a shock I realized that this was Mae, a character I’ve known since early in the first book. Howard has structured her vast web so that we are constantly un-learning or re-learning what we think we know about a character or relationship.

In each and every season, knowing becomes suspect and subject to revision. In fact, much of the movement of these books is a movement from the known to the unknown. The characters themselves experience the precariousness of changing their minds, making a choice, veering from one path, and sometimes veering back again, trading one type of knowledge for another. In The Silver Screen, Isabel Murphy, a girl who has fled the east coast and struck up a successful career in Hollywood, just as suddenly leaves California to come home for good. In the space of a page and a half she goes from a Hollywood to New Haven. Hers is a dramatic story. Choice and change aren’t always so. Lou’s mother Shirl finds out late in life that she likes to be alone. This happens accidentally-her husband’s sudden rise to fame in the bioengineering world leaves her on vacation alone in their timeshare-and she discovers that “alone was surprisingly O.K.” This discovery also works to quietly revise the memories Shirl has of a particular loner Aunt. In these books, knowing-and living-become processes of revision.

This strong sense of revision rescues most of the characters from the clutches of archetype. The very notable exception is Fiona O’Connor, a bright star who died young-at least that is how the other characters remember her. Fiona is the final, unanswered question. Her voice is conspicuously missing. She never gets to tell her version of the story. I could not stop comparing her to Percival, from Virginia Woolf’s novel The Waves. Percival is another bright star who died young. Much of that gorgeous novel is a triangulation around both his presence (when he is alive) and his absence (after he has died). So much of Howard’s quartet feeds off of Fiona’s enduring absence, her silence, the power both her presence and her absence had and have over the living.

In the final volume, The Rags of Time, omission takes on a pivotal role.

If the first volume of the quartet is an intensely observed story, the last volume is an intensely inhabited one. This may be due, in part, to the fact that the previously invisible narrator of these novels now becomes a character-Mimi, the writer who is finishing her quartet of seasons. This is an unnerving move for Howard to make, offering this narrator-writer a place in the story, enlarging an already large world to include the storyteller, who informs us soon enough that “this day’s outing [to Central Park] was a strategic maneuver against the assault of memory.” For Mimi? For the reader? The Rags of Time is very much an investigation of that assault.

Mimi grapples with her characters, with what she tells and doesn’t tell, with how she revises and arranges a story that must be as responsible for its omissions as it is for its inclusions. It’s a problem that narrative has: it always has to exclude more than it includes. Mimi’s characters share her struggle. At one point Artie even thinks of his grandmother, “who said something like that about our sins, most particularly sins of omission, that we could face them come Judgment Day.” Mimi struggles, in the end, with the fact that the story cannot encompass it all. There is too much. No wonder War and Peace becomes a pertinent trope in this book. A successful epic always manages to gesture towards an even larger, untold, story. Mimi reckons that stories are worth this cost: “You were wrong about information stealing life out of a story. That’s such a romantic notion. See, it’s all different now. You have to live it, live with the glut, the lottery prize of mechanical reproduction and still tell your story.”

The intimacy of the final volume is the intimacy of a story and characters that have been lived with for a very long time. This book has strayed into the narrator’s world, and unnerves with its uncanny proximity to ours. Mimi continues to tell the stories of her characters, but she can no longer escape the very visceral world she lives in-her workroom, New York City’s Central Park, et. al. Once again, nothing gets solved, only told. Howard’s quartet has very few epiphanies, and very little desire for them. These books seem more interested in (as one character puts it) “hanging in with uncharted lives, small truths-well, at least stories that may not set us free.”

A Lover’s Almanac is performative, dizzying, richly layered, like some fabulous brocade. By the time The Rags of Time emerges, the writing has taken a long journey, through the bittersweet and intoxicating Big As Life, through the sad rich quiet of The Silver Screen. Each volume succeeds in transforming its season into something foreign, unknown. And, like the seasons, each book expands and alters the stories that came before it. Because the seasons are cyclical instead of linear, this is, potentially, an infinite process. At the end of the forth book I wanted to begin all over again-I wanted to revise my reading with re-reading. What could the first volume say about the last? What could the early lives tell me about the later ones?

At the end of The Rags of Time the narrator departs, passes away, and it is her husband who has to look back at her work. Mimi began her project, her “seasons,” intending to write a love story. She has struggled with the love story. Examining her manuscript, thinking that he will hand it over to her editors, her husband now muses, “They must know she never got the love story right, said perhaps it was not meant to be a love story at all.” He’s right-and so is she: the love stories are not the central story. The central love story has to do with Time, and our relationship to it. We must be involved with Time whether we like it or not. How do we write that story? How do we live with it?

Blake Butler and Shane Jones, combined under the banner YEAR OF THE LIQUIDATOR, present…ONE HOUR OF TELEVISION by Kristina Born — a novel

THE FASTER TIMES: First, I’d be interested to learn more about you. I know you’re 21, 5′3”, 120 lbs., and that you live in Toronto, Ontario. But I want to know about the kind of stuff that makes you the writer you are, maybe stuff like: what magazines do you look at, what music do you listen to, what television shows do you watch, what books do you cherish, what relationships are most important to you, and/or what occupation pays your bills?

KRISTINA BORN: Actually, I just turned 22, I’m now closer to 100 lbs due to mysterious digestive ailments, and my boyfriend measured me against a wall and forced me to admit that I’m really only 5′2”. Such flux. Good TV for me is stuff like Carnivale, The Wire, Twin Peaks, Deadwood. New York Tyrant is the best lit mag out there period, but also Unsaid, DIAGRAM, Hobart, No Colony, Tin House. Good books are so many, but for now I will always pick out [David Foster Wallace's] Brief Interviews With Hideous Men as the most important. It changed me the most. Good music is Diamanda Galas, Neutral Milk Hotel, Fugazi, Nirvana, Radiohead, The Fugs, Nina Simone, Scout Niblett, Xiu Xiu, Erik Satie. I have an incredible group of smart, funny, pretty friends. I can’t imagine doing without them and when we play music together, it’s magic.

TFT: When you say that DFW’s Brief Interviews… changed you the most, could you say more about that? How? In what ways?

BORN: I mean that it completely destroyed the way I looked at literature, and my writing was never the same after I read it. It shook me up. Coming out of high school, I had read lots of books that I admired and that inspired me, but Brief Interviews, I think, was the first to really kick me in the head and make me go, “This is better work than I’ll ever do. I’m not a writer yet,” which I needed. Plus I had it taught to me by an amazing professor, Kim Michasiw, who I daresay is as fiercely brilliant as Foster Wallace was. So I came to realize that you can do all these fucked things with form and voice and Brief Interviews was the first thing that started showing me how.

I really hate the terms “novella” and “novelette” because they don’t mean anything.

TFT: What was your writing process like for One Hour of Television? Where was it written, under what conditions, and how much revision has it gone through since its initial creation?

BORN: I wrote the majority of OHT during the summer after my second year of university. I came home and worked a 10-hour graveyard shift at a local gas station. I was alone from 8pm-6am and since no one came in after about 11 or so, I had very little actual work to do. I wanted to give myself a writing project for the summer, so I decided that I would write a small story based on every element in the periodic table. I looked up each element on Wikipedia and took down a few facts that jumped at me, and wrote them in no particular order. After 11 at the gas station, the rule was that I had to write three sections, and then I was allowed to read Infinite Jest until around 3, when I mopped and started making coffee for the truckers. After about three weeks, some themes started to emerge and I realized it was a book.

It really hadn’t undergone significant revision until Blake [Butler] and Shane [Jones] got a hold of it. I knew that the ending had to be redone, but I hadn’t been able do it. I really think the whole thing would have failed utterly if it weren’t for their suggestions.

TFT: I’m interested in how you went about getting it published. Had you sent it out to other places? Were you looking for a publisher in Canada or the US or both or does that distinction even matter? How did you get hooked up with Blake and Shane?

BORN: I’ve never been published in Canada, and I don’t particularly think I ever will, which is fine. I don’t feel much of a connection with the literature that’s being published here right now, but I’ll talk more about that later.

I sent Blake WHAT IS ALLOWED for consideration for NO COLONY, and ended up having to withdraw it a few months later because Unsaid took it. He emailed me that day and apologized for not grabbing it first, and asked if I had anything else I could send. I didn’t have a working computer at the time, and the only things I had on my work computer were THE DELIVERY ROOM, which he did end up publishing in NO COLONY, and a draft of OHT. I sent him the draft too and shortly after, he said that he and Shane wanted to put it out.

I’m interested in a different solution: a complete monopoly of mood.

TFT: One of the many excellent things about your book is the way it resists genre classification. Is it a group of prose poems, is it a collection of short-shorts, is it a novella, is it…? (To me, it’s all those things and more.) I wonder how you see it in terms of genre. Do you even think about genre distinctions?

BORN: To me, it’s a novel. I really hate the terms “novella” and “novelette” because they don’t mean anything. It’s a short novel, that’s all. I’m not a poet and I would never describe my writing as prose poetry - which also doesn’t mean anything - and if I read something like Anne Carson’s DECREATION, which is a lot of different things, it seems pointless to me to try to classify it as plays or essays or poetry. It’s a book and it’s good.

TFT: I’m wondering about the page layout. It’s so sparse; there’s so much white space. For me, it evokes an eerie kind of silence, which plays an interesting counterpoint to the sharpness of language. Could you say a little something about that choice?

BORN: I wanted it to be suffocating. Gertrude Stein thought (mostly in reference to her plays, I believe) that you can’t write emotional arcs, because if the reader is not in the exact right emotional state at the right stage in the arc, you’ll lose him. Her solution was to put everything on the page immediately, like a painting, and allow the reader to pick out what resonated with him at the time. I’m interested in a different solution: a complete monopoly of mood. I want to try to write in a way where the reader can pick up the book, read any sentence, and be immediately crunched down into the mood he should be in.

That doesn’t mean that there is only one mood throughout the book; there are funny parts and sad parts and what have you. What it means is, throughout all these different moods, I try to use diction to create an underlying tone that deadens the moods. So the reader, while he experiences the variable moods of the book, is simultaneously experiencing this monotonous tone, which will hopefully anchor him.

I’ve probably explained this badly.

TFT: No, that makes sense. I especially like what you say about wanting “a complete monopoly of mood.” But now this has got me thinking about your choice to write the narrative “I” from the male perspective. Did it just come out that way or was it a conscious decision/challenge?

BORN: I almost always write from the male perspective when I’m writing in first person, whether gender is specified in the piece or not. I think I’m always trying to get as far away from autobiography as possible. I tend to get into a pretty dark headspace when I think about myself in any real way, so I avoid too much introspection when I write. Despite popular theory, it’s terribly hard to be creative when you’re bummed out. I’m trying to work around this problem with my next project, though, so we’ll see if that stays true.

I think it’s worth noting that even Anne Carson, who’s one of the few continuing to fuck language, is first a classicist.

TFT: There’s also the narrative voice of “we,” which almost seems to function as the voice of the collective consciousness of the community. Do you envision these narrative voices as separate from each other or somehow interconnected?

BORN: Well, the collective unconscious of the community, really. The two–the conscious “I” and the unconscious “we”–are separate, but tenuously. We all have this store of weird, half-remembered information in our heads, information about who we are and how the world is, and I think that you can only break away from that so much. In the book, one of the functions of the narrative “we” is to establish the kinds of voices that the “I” might be hearing.

TFT: How do you think about this book in terms of how it fits or doesn’t fit within the world of literature? Do you feel like this book is in conversation with any other books–if so, which ones?

BORN: OHT was written partly as protest against current Canadian literature, so it’s necessarily in conversation with the short-lived era of Canadian experimental literature from about 1965-1985. Since 1985, Canadian literature has been predominantly historical and familial, and I find it painful that no one seems to want to look forward or even attempt to address the present climate of the country. There are exceptions, of course (Christian Bök’s Xenotext Experiment, for example), but I think it’s worth noting that even Anne Carson, who’s one of the few continuing to fuck language, is first a classicist.

I don’t consider myself an especially political person, but this chronic passivity, particularly among young Canadian artists, is what allowed Stephen Harper to cut $45 million in arts funding and then be swiftly re-elected.

TFT: Call me crazy, but I get a sense that there are at least two kinds of writers who are writing prose right now: writers who consider themselves story-centric and writers who consider themselves sentence-centric. What is your take on that split? Do you consider yourself one of those two kinds of writers?

BORN: This split seems pretty ridiculous to me. I mean, I think most writers considered to be story-centric are just linear-narrative-centric and most writers considered to be sentence-centric are just non-linear-narrative-centric, so why not say that? That actually means something. And anyone who calls himself a non-narrative writer is probably a little crazy. I don’t care if you have three dots on a page; three dots is expression, expression is a telling, a telling is narrative.

Monday, October 26, 2009, the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses hosted

How could I not bid with all these bright tables in front of me piled with gifts? Gifts like dinner for two at Soho House, editorial consultation with editor Ethan Nosowsky–Est. Value: Priceless, a pet portrait, and a Paul Smith tie. My brother would like a Paul Smith tie, I thought. I leaned in, holding out my pink Bee Prepared Svedka cocktail–Est. Value: $2000, Minimum Bid: $1000. There was one bid in the mead notebook–$1500–but a woman erased it and wrote $1000. She looked up and smiled. I smiled. With my eyes I said, “Rough times.”  The tie was in a box. I couldn’t see it. What if it wasn’t your color? No, for $2000, they wouldn’t stick you with one tie. You’d have options. I thought, There is nothing in that box. To my left was a white headless mannequin in a tweed three-piece Paul Smith suit. It was posed like it was walking down a London street. I wanted the mannequin to have a head and walk with me down the street, or to stay headless but hold me and open doors. I bid on an evening of Capote cocktails at Bookmarks Lounge.

The contestants wore gold antennae that bobbed and sparkled at the front of the room. Jesse Sheidlower (editor-at-large of the Oxford English Dictionary) sat at a white desk to the left with a Macbook open and some dictionaries he didn’t open. He had shiny black hair and a neatly knotted tie with pastel spheres. Announcing the rules, he said, “You are commended thus,” and rang a bell. “You are discommended thus,” he said and blew a slide whistle that made a sad sound. The emcee, literary agent Ira Silverberg, sat next to him. Ira Silverberg’s boyfriend, Bob Morris was supposed to emcee but was “stuck in Brazil.”

Ira Silverberg thanked Harper Perennial for sponsoring the event and noted that the Bee was part of Harper’s effort to reach out to small presses and online journals like HTML Giant and its editors. People clapped. I clapped. I wondered who in this room filled with pillars of print publishing was wondering what HTML Giant was. I wondered if they all knew.

Ira Silverberg said some words that people had “walked out” on in the past: horticulture, hassenpfeffer, cappuccino. Alex Kuczynski, author of Beauty Junkies, who misspelled cappuccino last time, stood up in defense. She said it was because she had been thinking about the Capuchin monks. “C-A-P-P-U-C-C-I-N-O,” she said. People clapped. She was tall with long blond hair and knee-high black boots. Except for the gold balls, the skinny headband looked appropriate on her.

James Frey got up and Ira Silverberg said James Frey had done the Bee a few times with them, but “then there was that woman who got in the way–and now you’re back.” Ira Silverberg said there was a rumor that James Frey had met his publisher at the beach, in the Hamptons. But  by the tone in his voice, it seemed like that wasn’t really a rumor. James Frey denied that. James Frey said he was “the only person he knows who has a daughter whose godfather dresses like a woman.”

James Frey got blazonry. He said the other times, he had lost on the first round. “Not this time,” a woman in the audience shouted. James Frey said, “B-L-A-Z-E-N-R-Y. Blazonry.” The slide whistle sounded. Holding up his antennae, James Frey walked to the corner and said, “Support small publishers.”

Maira Kalman got up. She misspelled delinquency, got the slide whistle and went to the corner.

Along the walls there was seating cushioned with a black-and-white spirogyra pattern. At the corner where the two walls met, James Frey sat with his arms spread over the tops of the cushions at each side. He leaned his head to one side, crossed his legs and looked out into space.

Alex Kuczynski said, “I really should have listened to Maira.” She started to spell delinquency and paused. She started again. She stopped. “Oh my god,” she said. “I just had a baby by the way.”

Rosalind Kilkenny McLymont, editor-in-chief of the Network Journal, said she was a licensed Zumba® instructor. “Give me a beat somebody,” she said. The audience clapped and she moved her hips from side to side.

“This word was meant for Michael Musto,” said Ira Silverberg as Michael Musto went up to the microphone in a blue jacket and blue shirt. “Michael Musto–”

“Is a penis,” said Michael Musto. “In fact, I’m only here,” he said, “because I didn’t get an assignment…I fucked your husband. He’s not in Brazil at all. He’s at the Mineshaft around the corner.”

“Dirndl,” said Ira Silverberg.

“Okay. Dirndl,” said Michael Musto and got very still, closed his eyes tight and put his hands up to his head moving it right and left gently. He opened his eyes. “D-E-R-N-D-E-L. Dirndl.” he said. Jesse Sheidlower blew the slide whistle.

James Frey bounced his gold antennae over his knee.

Sally Singer of Vogue, who was in the film the September Issue, got up. Ira Silverberg said about the fashion world, “And you think our world is fucked up.” Her skirt was angular and poofed out–the kind of skirt you had to understand.

Ben Greenman took his antennae off every time he came up. When he sat down he put them back on. His lips were a straight line and his eyes were focused and serious.

Victor Lavalle got inflammation. “Come on,” two people in the audience yelled simultaneously like someone rigged it.

James Frey leaned forward holding three sets of gold antennae over his knees. He must have collected them from the other losers. I wondered how this transaction occurred because it didn’t seem like the people in the losers’ section were talking to each other.

For the last word, colophon, Alex Kuczynski said, “Ah…I think it’s C-A– [exhale].” She lost.

Francine Prose uncrossed her legs, tossed back her black hair and in her long black pants and scarf walked to the microphone. She lost too.

Ben Greenman said in a joking tone of voice that there was only one other way to spell it.  Still, he looked serious. Holding his antennae, he said, “C-O-L-O-P-H-O-N. Colophon.” He put on a crown made of silver foil.

Thankfully, I was outbid. I opened my umbrella and from my gift bag, among other gifts, I pulled out Little Red, a children’s book by Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York.

***

Original illustration © André da Loba

Photo of Ben Greenman in crown.

J.A. Tyler is the founding editor of the online quarterly Mud Luscious (2007) and Mud Luscious Press (2008), both venues for “aggressive / experimental writing.” However one defines “aggressive” or “experimental” (see J.A. Tyler’s answer below), since the start, Mud Luscious has been publishing authors known or becoming known for breaking, with method, expectations about form, both on a narrative and sentence level. And with determined consistency, Mud Luscious has been fulfilling its goal featuring such authors as Shane Jones, Ken Sparling, Kendra Grant Malone, Michael Kimball, Elizabeth Ellen and Brian Evenson. And in December 2009, J.A. Tyler will expand his enterprise even further with the publication of MLP’s first perfect-bound novel(la), Molly Gaudry’s WE TAKE ME APART (an excerpt of which was first published as a chapbook). Two other novellas, by Ben Brooks and Sasha Fletcher, are also lined up.

MLP’s most recent development is its announcement this week that in January 1, 2010 it will be putting out an anthology of all 43 of the mini-chapbooks it has published thus far–great news for those who missed out on those pretty little chaps, which sell out, unsurprisingly, almost immediately upon production. (See my piece on the mini-chaps here).

In addition to running all arms of Mud Luscious, J.A. Tyler continues to write and publish his own work. He is the author of the forthcoming novellas Someone, Somewhere (Ghost Road Press, 2009) and In Love With A Ghost (Willows Wept Press, 2010) as well as the chapbooks The Girl In The Black Sweater (Trainwreck Press, 2008) and Everyone In This Is Either Dying Or Will Die Or Is Thinking Of Death (Achilles Chapbook Series, 2008). He is also currently publishing his novel(la) The Zoo, A Going online in serialized format.  J.A. Tyler was nice enough to answer some questions I had about MLP, serialization and the non-chronological aspects of film.

The Faster Times: What does “experimental” mean to you? I think it is a term that is overused and has lost some of its meaning in any general sense, or rather has a very person-specific meaning.

J.A. Tyler: true, true, ‘experimental’ is often overused and really doesn’t mean much to readers / writers anymore because of its constant use. for me, it means something that I haven’t seen before, something that hits me as profoundly different - that is why I tend towards describing our work as violent / beautiful / pulsing - I want a text that shatters, that buries me in its lines. and I suppose too that I use ‘experimental’ or sometimes ‘innovative’ in order to scare away the exposition-heavy writers, those who spoon-feed actions / events as if readers are not smart enough to discover what a text is doing. I look to the work of james chapman as well as his fugue state books, jesse ball and blake butler, those writers who aren’t afraid to omit the narrative details in favor of descriptive tones and overall voice, those works that reach into me without pandering, hand-holding, without guiding me as if I am blind.

The digestible text size was a bit like water finding its own level.

TFT: How and why did you start Mud Luscious?

JAT: I started the online portion of Mud Luscious because I wanted a hand in editing. I wanted to read as much new writing as I could and to launch myself into the scene, to make a run at working with authors in every aspect of the lit community. Starting my own venue was a simple and readily available answer to those wants. Mud Luscious then gained readership, and I gained experience, and it seemed that print was smart way to expand, so we did, bringing on the chapbook series and now branching into our novel(la) series.

TFT: Your press has a very unique quality. The mini-chapbooks are simple but extraordinarily beautiful and have a unique look. How did you come up with the idea to publish the chapbooks and the particular length of the fiction you publish?

JAT: One Story was a start, but reading their work felt a bit mechanical to me - the texts were lacking the edge I wanted for our series and the production, while high quality, seemed a little less human than we wanted. Futuretense was also a place that showed me, very simply, that beautiful and stirring lit can be made of staples and paper and nothing else. The last factor was that I wanted to produce something that I could do for little expense, at my kitchen table, and yet bring something big into the literary world. The digestible text size was a bit like water finding its own level, and it has been fast forward since then.

TFT: While all the writing I’ve read from the various writers you publish is distinct, there’s a quality that is discernibly “mud luscious” in feel, which is natural, I think, for any good press. How did you begin finding the writers for Mud Luscious? And do you solicit or do you accept unsolicited writing, or both?

JAT: Thanks. I do hope that our writers, collectively, amount to a kind of immeasurable aesthetic - so feeling that in reading our authors is a great compliment. With the online component, issue zero - when no one knew us - was entirely solicited; we wanted to hit the ground running. Since then, we have not solicited anything for any other online issues. As for the chapbook series, I solicit about 1/3 of our volumes and the rest come from the submissions pool. The novel(la)s at this point are mostly works that I have either solicited in part or in full, but new queries are always accepted and read with interest. We have never closed to submissions of any kind and are happy to continue that tradition.

TFT: How many chapbooks do you publish per print-run? And have you ever done a second printing?

JAT: Our first three titles were printed in editions of less than 50 - the next 20 or so had to be increased to 75-100 to accommodate sales - and now, with this latest stretch, we print at least 100 to make sure we can meet demand. We have never done second printings of an individual chapbook, but our new anthology MLP [ FIRST YEAR ] is the second printing of each of our first 43 volumes in one collection - so now they are all wrapped together and fit nicely on the shelf.

And yes, I assume it was fun - must have been great to witness Blake Butler destroying those copies of Scorch Atlas.

TFT: What are Stamp Stories and how can I get them?

JAT: Stamp Stories was an idea we had to foster a more collaborative spirit between indie presses - I wanted people to buy from all of these great presses - I read their work and I love them - so I thought what better enticement than to get some sort of micro mud luscious story distributed for free with these other presses. So we solicited authors to pen 50 word stories, we print them on 1×1 cardstock, ship a load of one particular story to an indie press and have them distribute that story as they see fit. Think lit baseball cards - order from all these cool presses and collect the Stamp Stories that come along for the ride. You can see the full current listing on our website - and any order from those presses should yield a Stamp Story tucked away somewhere inside, a kind of buried lit treasure.

TFT: I recently purchased Scorch Atlas from Featherproof and was pleasantly surprised to get along with it one of your chapbooks. I like the idea of small presses working together in this way. Are there any such upcoming collaborations in the works?

JAT: The chapbook with Scorch Atlas was most likely A Field of Colors by Charles Lennox, a volume that we gave away to every single person who emailed us anytime during the month of June, 2009. We wanted to get that Lennox story out there to everyone - an mlp chapbook for anyone who asked - and we ended up sending that title to a dozen different countries and nearly every state, over 400 copies when all were shipped. But as stories go, this one continues: the wonderful Peter Cole at Keyhole Magazine / Books contacted us about including A Field of Colors with their then current Keyhole volume. We agreed and made more copies. And I believe what copies did not go with Keyhole took a van trip with the Dollar Store Reading Series, distributed widely there, and then the last copies ended up shipping eventually with Scorch Atlas. Quite a journey.

We also, way back when, collaborated with Publishing Genius Press by making extra copies of Shane Jones’ Black Kids in Lemon Trees to ship with the first twenty-five pre-orders of Light Boxes.

And, looking ahead, we have plans to distribute a handful of free copies of David Peak’s Museum of Fucked, the first chapbook release from the newly established Warm Milk Printing Press (Ben Spivey, Jennifer Whitley, Kyle Whitley). Who knows what else, but we are always open to work with another press - we love collaboration.

TFT: Did you take a van trip with the Dollar Store Reading Series, or did the chapbooks alone take that trip? And if you did, that must have been a fun time.

JAT: To clarify: I did not take a trip with the Dollar Store Reading Series, Charles Lennox’s A Field of Colors took a trip with the Dollar Store Reading Series and hopefully found its way into the hands of many readers. And yes, I assume it was fun - must have been great to witness Blake Butler destroying those copies of Scorch Atlas.

TFT: The Zoo, A Going, a “novel(la)” which is forthcoming from Sunnyoutside Press, is currently being published in serialized form, 76 pieces over 76 days, on the internet. What are the pros and cons of publishing it this way?

JAT: There is a portion of this ms coming out from Sunnyoutside Press as a 2010 chapbook, but I decided that I wanted to do some sort of quick serialization, a la stephen elliot’s lending library project, or shya scanlon’s FORECAST – mostly to see how it would be received, if people would follow it along, and how this kind of publication might work. The pros are that it is free to read and nicely pressurized I think, since each piece is only posted for 24 hrs. The cons are the time consumption of loading each individual text into a blog, missing people who want to read but come to the party too late, and of course giving away your lit for free, though that is certainly something I am happy to do if it means more readers of my work, even if only a handful at a time.

TFT: Have you gotten a sense for whether or not people have been following along? What kind of feedback have you gotten? You’ve done it slightly differently than Shya or Steven. You’ve been posting a chapter of your work on one site, and taking each post down after 24 hours. Whereas Shya’s is published on a variety of websites and will be up for the duration of the period of Forecast 42 Project, and well Stephen’s project consisted of physical books being sent around to participants. But Shya’s and Stephen’s are meant to be read straight through, whereas your work seems to be digestible in independent sections.

JAT: I really have no sense of how many folks have been reading, but there have been good comments on quite a few of the pieces and some nice publicity around the blogs / sites as well. Mostly though, Shya and Steven just made me think about how I could somehow introduce an entire ms to the reading public in some sort of free venue. And I made it a brief encounter (the 24 hr. post of each segment) so that the overall ms was not pinned online absolutely or at any loss for future print consideration.

Plus Kimball is a badass, you know how it goes.

TFT: Your life story was written on a postcard by Michael Kimball as part of a writing project he’s doing where he writes life stories on postcards. In your postcard life story, it said: J. A. watches tons of movies and loves the non-chronological aspects of film. Is this connected in any way to what was said further down on the postcard: It should also be mentioned that a lot of people have died during J. A.’s lifetime and that the older he gets the more he thinks about it. It is frightening that we are always aging. This is a leading question.

JAT: Yes I suppose so - nice lead - I just find myself drawn to death in so much of my writing, and I believe it comes from an overwhelming sub-conscious focus on that aspect of life. And movies find their way in because a movie, though it is mostly presented chronologically, is almost always filmed out of order - and I like to think of making writing and language work that way: out of order but in the end creating a whole and engaging narrative.

TFT: What is one of your favorite films? If any of them is a documentary, preferably list the documentary. This is a question that reveals bias.

JAT: I just recently saw the documentary I Like Killing Flies - how fascinating to see this family and how they live and how they approach moving on, growing older, changing times, etc. Plus they say motherfucker like it is going out of style. And, in relation to your earlier Michael Kimball mention, I am so looking forward to seeing I Will Smash You - the clips roaming online have me super intrigued. Plus Kimball is a badass, you know how it goes.

TFT: Now that you mention I Will Smash You, I’ll say Michael Kimball is a badass. He smashed a lot of stuff in I Will Smash You. And now I have to ask: if you could choose one item to smash what would it be?

JAT: I would love to smash anything made of glass, the more glass the better, I love the way it shatters.

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Images:

1) Cover of J.A. Tyler’s first chapbook EVERYONE IN THIS IS EITHER DYING OR WILL DIE OR IS THINKING OF DEATH (Retouched photograph of Angela Landsbury) courtesy of Sam Pink.

2) Home photograph of J.A. Tyler (right, before discovering the non-chronological aspects of film)

Most luscious of the output of J.A. Tyler’s Mud Luscious are the limited edition 4×4 “mini-chaps,” published each month in trios. Recent news that Mud Luscious is publishing an anthology of all 43 of the chapbooks in January 2010 is a boon to readers since the chaps are printed in one run only and sell out almost immediately. Subscriptions are closed until January.

Pocket-sized and with hand-stamped covers, these go with me everywhere to help keep active that part of my brain that feeds on fresh voice and syntax. But though they are so small, so pretty and so nice to touch do not be deceived. The stories in these chaps, all between 500-1000 words, are demanding and require focus. They do weird things with language sometimes, make you have to let go a little and give in to another’s logic. But in letting go you will be rewarded.

Here are some examples of stories that have recently caught my attention. Some elements I have come to think of as embodied by Mud Luscious stories are: heart, an urgent and satisfying destabilization, and extreme concern for detail. That so much can be packed into so small a package is continually surprising. But I think the best way to show you is to show you, and let you see for yourself what I mean. Here are excerpts from five stories:

thunderstorm as familial convulsion - ryan call (this ongoing project to “produce a new and much needed field guide to north american weather” is an analysis as insightful of the singular turbulent nature of the North American family as it is of thunderstorms.)

“Such a transformation is rarely appreciated, however, until after the thunderstorm has passed, revealing to those left behind the forgotten corners of their lives, how they shine in the sun, how the brittleness has gone away, how guilt can only accompany someone equally attuned to love.”

from the hip - mary hamilton (I was as amazed by the control and consistency in this piece as I was by the ingenuity of Mary Hamilton’s language)

“The man in black doesn’t notice, but you does, & so does I, bike messenger.

I hears the sound of an orchestra playing in her mind.

I feels the tremors of a big band traipsing across Marta’s skin.

I sees a man all dressed in black & we mistakes you for the Maestro.”

a thousand & one others, yes - elizabeth ellen (this one is heartbreaking. that’s all I’ll say. If you want a fuller review, there’s one just up at The Chapbook Review.)

so dark in the wolf’s maw - kevin wilson (this conveyed all the wonder and fear I felt as a child reading fables)

“She thinks of the handful of seahorse fry that she ate earlier, the babies less than a quarter inch long, the bones dissolving on her tongue without the need for chewing.”

parts - molly gaudry (parts is an excerpt from the novel(la) WE TAKE ME APART forthcoming from Mud Luscious Press)

“ovules

that upon fertilization become seeds

like sequins I sewed those ovules to the hems

of those women’s dresses & liked to

think of them shining & glittering as they

undressed before the watching eyes of lovers”

Around 3 p.m. Sam was standing inside an enclosed area on the edge of the park holding a trash bag and the grabbing stick, staring into the distance, when he saw Travis, a manager at the organic vegan restaurant where he now worked, looking at him.

‘I didn’t know you volunteered,’ said Travis.

‘I have two days’ community service,’ said Sam.

Sam, the protagonist of Tao Lin’s new novella Shoplifting From American Apparel, has just been caught by his boss doing community service for shoplifting. It is a moment that could be charged with drama and social consequence. A moment where the boss might question Sam’s ability to function at work, or question whether Sam is morally “upright,” or think something about picking up trash. Sam could feel dejected, afraid of losing his job, or think something about picking up trash. This is how it gets resolved:

‘Oh, I had this once,’ said Travis grinning.

Sam moved the grabbing stick around in the air. He had been moving slowly to prevent himself from sweating. It was early October and a little warm.

Shoplifting is an autobiographical novella that spans two years in the life of Sam, Tao Lin’s alter ego. In 2007, Tao Lin published his first two books, the story collection Bed and the novel Eeeee Eee Eeee simultaneously, which hadn’t been done since Ann Beattie did it in 1976. This marked what would begin an energetic and creative venture in self-promotion.  In 2008, he sold six 10% shares with the promise of “more meaning in life” at $2000 a piece to would-be investors in Richard Yates, a novel due out in 2010, which at that time he had yet to write. The shares sold out. He has sold his personal effects on eBay, published his “to do” lists online including items like “Steal,” and has signed a sponsorship deal with Hipster Runoff.  He has been “despised” by Gawker for “his spammy, retarded, deceptive, always on the verge of interesting but never actually interesting Internet stunts,” and then been pardoned. He has been called “a world class perpetrator of gimmickry.” His internet antics have made some people angry and others delighted. And while some might like to believe that his speedy literary rise is due mostly to his relentless self-promotion, with Shoplifting, the twenty-six-year-old has now put out five books, which fairly represent his talent, intelligence, firm moral grounding and consistent philosophical beliefs, which underlay all of his work, some more obviously than others. He has stated in an interview with Bookslut that his “life is controlled by ethics and morals,” and “without morals life is meaningless in the long-term.” His ethics and philosophy are most openly demonstrated in his two books of poetry, You Are a Little Bit Happier Than I Am and Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy, both of which are incredibly strong. And another plus: he knows his audience well–hipsters–and courts it fiercely.

With respect to his writing, Tao Lin remains steadfast about his preference for concrete details to the near exclusion of abstraction. And as demonstrated in the passage above, Tao Lin takes on some of the hallmark attributes of K-Mart realism, such as a compressed style, attention to surface detail, interchangeable characters comically lacking in affect, and conscious abstention from value judgments. Above, Tao Lin avoids revealing the internal states of the characters Sam and Travis and keeps the reader as distant as possible from the characters without relegating the reader to the position of a random observer on the street. Tao Lin doesn’t tell the reader what to think. But that’s not to say that the moment between Sam and his boss isn’t charged, that there isn’t a sense of curiosity as to how the situation will transpire, that there isn’t a sense of surprise and humor at how the run-in is resolved, and that it doesn’t provide information about the character of our protagonist Sam, who, we are told is trying to prevent himself from sweating. Given a small amount of information, the reader is forced to think for himself and determine where to place or not to place meaning and relevance.

While the reader is not given much direction about how to feel or what to think, that moment did not leave me cold. Just the opposite. This brief passage for me was filled with energy, tenderness and surprise. In his refusal to engage the tropes of social fiction, Tao Lin leaves passages like this open to personal interpretation. And I don’t think the emotional effect was unintentional. The passage is handled with great care to produce the effects of energy, tenderness and surprise. Shoplifting is a collection of such moments. And it is a testament to Tao Lin’s talent and skills as a writer that such a passage, which on its surface seems to reveal very little, can give rise to deeper revelation about the characters and even the reader.

The event for which the book is named, and which promises to be the most climactic scene, is no exception to Tao Lin’s industrious leveling. The shoplifting incident is no more or less important than the scooping of steamed vegetables into a carton at work. The event happens early on, and Sam quickly moves ahead with his life with little further mention of the shoplifting incident. There seems to be no larger issue at stake involving the incident, or if there is, it isn’t made clear. There is no traditional narrative arc. The events of Sam’s life during this time are selected and reported in linear fashion with mind-spinning momentum and include trips to Atlantic City and Gainseville, Florida, outings to bars and concerts, an awkward encounter with Moby, unexpected pranks with friends, breakups with girlfriends and felt moments of despair and loneliness, which is a given for Tao Lin’s fiction and poetry.

Tao Lin is aware of the reader’s expectation and with a decisive move, he precisely undercuts that expectation. In that sense he reminds me of another writer who has a similar knack for creating highly charged situations and flouting expectation. In Frederick Barthelme’s story “Violet,” in the collection Moon Deluxe, a sixteen-year-old girl knocks on a man’s door and asks to use his phone. He let’s her in as if he has no choice. She’s in his apartment:

“Got any juice?” She backs toward the kitchen. “I love juice. Any kind. My name’s Violet.”

I follow her to the kitchen, reaching for her hand. “I’m Philip. Let’s see what we can hunt up.”

“I’m a runaway,” she says. “I know it’s old-fashioned, but my parents are intolerable.”

The scene is stripped of any moral or sexual undertones that might ordinarily embellish such a situation, and due to the placement of the events in this upended context, the reader is forced to observe the mores that would obtain to the situation, or that she has been conditioned to attach to the situation. She feels suspense on the one hand, because she expects that someone will be morally compromised. But there is a simultaneous feeling of safety, that no one will be morally compromised, and excitement inevitably follows from the destabilization of the reader’s grounding. And Barthelme plays with that tension. For the next twelve pages the man and girl go out for dinner, run into someone Violet knows, and then go to a bar called The Tip Top Club where the story takes off in a whole new direction and the issue that initially seemed central, that of the girl being a runaway, is left behind. A similar destabilization occurs in Shoplifting. The reader comes to understand that what happens next will be something she had not considered.

Shoplifting seems to fall comfortably in the heritage of dirty realism, or K-Mart realism. Madison Smartt Bell in his 1986 essay “Less is Less: The Dwindling American Short Story” described the work–that would later be called K-Mart realism–of what he called a new “school” of emerging writers, which included Amy Hempel, Frederick Barthelme, Ann Beattie and the work of Raymond Carver at that time. Bell outlines the characteristics demonstrated by this school of writing as a “trim, ‘minimal’ style, an obsessive concern for surface detail, a tendency to ignore or eliminate distinctions among the people it renders, and a studiedly deterministic, at times nihilistic, vision of the world.”  Shoplifting has the characteristic unadorned language, the declarative sentences, the concern for surface detail–”Sam said he was going to eat a giant steak with A1 sauce if he won $2000 or lost all but $20″–the seeming interchangeability of characters and the kind of determinism that renders his characters at times apparently with no will of their own and with no responsibility for their actions. For example, this passage where Tao Lin seems to be tipping his hat to dimestore determinism:

Sam said he would roll like a log to go get it. But he was facing the wrong direction. ‘roll to go get it, Audrey,’ he said. ‘You’re facing the right direction.’

Audrey started rolling…

‘It’s funny you got her to do that,’ said Jeffrey.

And there are those who present the nothingness-and-nihilism argument with respect to Tao Lin, like Ben Beitler. In a recent review for The Village Voice, Beitler stated, “Because Lin withholds any description beyond gender and, occasionally, race, his characters are in constant danger of fading into nothingness.” And further on, he states, “On the verge of total disappearance-barely sketched in by their own author!-Lin’s characters nevertheless manage to remind each other of their existence constantly.” This argument is reminiscent of Bell’s argument against the work of the K-mart realists, “At every juncture the stories insist on their own lack of depth (e.g., “Everything is for nothing”). Bell railed against stories in which “nothing is at issue except the characters’ groundless angst.”

I’m not convinced that the determinism of the characters is haphazard and isn’t deserving of a closer look though. If someone, like Sam, has no will, he isn’t responsible for his actions. And if he isn’t responsible for his actions, he can’t be held accountable when he does something like steal. I wouldn’t put it past Tao Lin, who has maintained a deeply philosophical position, to highlight this event among many other possible events and then render it consequently flat with the purpose of raising a moral question.

But while Shoplifting presents characters who wander around drinking Kombucha and wearing the wildly rampant “neutral facial expression,” and whose actions don’t work toward the fulfillment of a narrative climax, they are placed in situations that are either interesting in and of themselves or are rendered interesting by Tao Lin’s skillful transitions, which though seemingly superficial, are a substantive quality that is not easily copied. Similar to Barthelme, Tao Lin builds interest and knows when to move on:

“Do you think those two girls standing by that guy are going to make out?” said Kaitlyn.

“That’s a man,” said Sam.

Kaitlyn took out stationery she bought earlier that day. Sam waved at Paula who was talking to Matt. “Do you want stationery?” said Kaitlyn a few minutes later to Paula. “I want stationery,” said Sam. Briana walked by and knocked over Sam’s mojito which was on the floor. Briana walked away. “Did people get really drunk last year?” said Sam.

“Ben got really drunk and fell down,” said Paula.

And while Shoplifting does not make an effort to dramatize “the important issues of the day,” as Jonathan Franzen claimed he once believed was the responsibility of the social novel,  it is not a novel about nothing. Tao Lin eschews value judgments in his writing, but he presents situations that raise moral questions in the mind of the reader. He may not tell the reader how to think, but the questions seem foremost on his mind and that is an undercurrent that I’ve seen in all of his writing that I’ve read, including his short story collection, his first novel, and both poetry collections. Tao Lin may or may not be making a point about nihilism, but the characters in Shoplifting, interchangeable as they are, are the most fun-loving group of emo, ragtag, socially challenged depressives you will most likely ever encounter. And while it has been said that nothing new can be done with realism, I think Tao Lin has shown that as long as times change, and new writers are born so too will what a writer can do with the reality at hand.

With his memoir The Adderall Diaries, author Stephen Elliott finally leaves behind his fictive skin that had served so well as a cover for the stories in his prior six books not so loosely based on his life, which involved a childhood spent in juvenile detention centers, sadomasochism and struggles with addiction. Elliot’s prior novels include Happy Baby, which was a Finalist for The New York Public Library’s Young Lion Award and was selected as a Best Book of 2004 by The Village Voice, Salon.com and Newsday. He has edited for McSweeney’s and MacAdam Cage and his writing has been featured in Esquire, The New York Times, GQ, and Best American Non-Required Reading 2005 and 2007. He was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and is also the Founding Editor of The Rumpus. Elliott, whose memoir was just released by Graywolf Press, takes a moment to talk to TFT about money, murderers, and deconstructing mythologies.

THE FASTER TIMES: In an autobiographical post on your culture website The Rumpus about your first published story, you wrote, “Like everything else I wrote it was basically true. My fiction was just reality-PLUS, a slightly more intense version of the world I lived in.” You’ve since published seven books, the latest of which, The Adderall Diaries, is a memoir. What is the difference to you between writing fiction and writing memoir?

STEPHEN ELLIOTT: Wow, that’s a good question. There are more constraints in memoir. You can’t conflate characters, for instance. Or you can, but I don’t. If someone gets upset, you can’t hide behind “Hey, it’s fiction.” The main rule for memoir, in my opinion, is you can’t knowingly lie. That’s a fine line. You can remember something differently from someone else, interpret events differently, but you can’t knowingly make things up. If you’re presenting something as true it has to be true to you.

I think that a lot of memoirists actually try to get away with false conclusions, happy endings, neat narrative tricks that give their story a smoother arc. I don’t believe in doing that.

To state that something is true to your memory puts a lot of constraints on the writing. But the constraints actually make you more creative as you learn to work within them. Of course, a really good memoir should hold up to the scrutiny of a novel. It shouldn’t even matter that it’s true. Books like [Tobias Wolff's] This Boy’s Life and [Michelle Tea's] Valencia are just as good when you think they’re novels as when you think they’re memoirs.

TFT: I’m wondering if writing the memoir was a way for you to reclaim your memory. You wrote in The Adderall Diaries, “I wondered how much I had mythologized my own history.” You also wrote that your father has consistently tried to flout the assertions you make in your novels about the experiences you’ve had in your life such as your claim that you ran away from home at the age of thirteen, and were not able to return home. Has The Adderall Diaries helped you reclaim your memory?

SE: I do think writing is a way to claim stories as your own, and The Adderall Diaries is certainly an example of that. Of course, it’s not about being right. We all have our own stories. My father’s stories are valid and true, even if they contradict my own. But these are my stories, and they are true to me.

I’ve been writing for a long time, since I was like ten years old. Writing is how I figure out how I feel about things, what I remember, what I believe. Usually, I write to make sense of the world. For a while the conflict with my father brought me to a halt. I questioned my own stories, which are the foundation of my identity. I started to disappear. It was a journey to come to a place where I could accept that my history didn’t depend on the agreement of others.

Most kids go home by ten o’clock to their family, but in the group homes there might be twenty of us staying up all night playing dice for t-shirts and tattoos.

TFT: You also have an oral histories project that you’ve been running on The Rumpus, in which you’ve had people you’ve known throughout your life tell their stories about you. I’m wondering if this has to do with a desire to distill from their experiences a collective memory that validates your own. What motivated the oral histories project?

SE: I just think the people I grew up with are really fascinating. Because I spent my adolescence in group homes, I had a much larger social network than most people. Most kids go home by ten o’clock to their family, but in the group homes there might be twenty of us staying up all night playing dice for t-shirts and tattoos. It’s fascinating interviewing all these people. I call it “An Oral History of Myself” because I’m the connection between everybody. But it’s really about them. It always ends up being about them.

Through the interviews I’ve come to realize some of the shared myths of our childhood. Like, everyone remembers robbing parking meters. It’s the one thing that gets brought up in almost every interview. “We used to rob parking meters.”

TFT: You were writing a book part of which involved a man convicted of murder [Hans Reiser], and your time sitting through his trial as well as communicating with him face to face though you weren’t a journalist. What drew you to this person as subject matter? You turned away an offer from 20/20 to use you in a segment to sensationalize the case, so it seems the intent wasn’t mercenary.

SE: Was it mercenary? Was it not mercenary? It’s not so cut and dry, I think. What drew me to the trial initially was that Hans Reiser’s best friend, Sean S., confessed to eight murders. Hans was accused of killing his wife and his wife had left him for Sean. Sean and I had a lot of links from the San Francisco BDSM community. I even did a bondage photo shoot in his house back in 1999. The murders Sean was confessing to were all people who had abused him when he was a child. I had also been abused as a child. So I was really drawn to Sean’s story. We met a few times and then he disappeared. By that point I was immersed in Hans’s trial. But there’s this other thing going on. My father also confessed to a murder in his unpublished memoir. I had been holding onto that information for a long time, wondering what to do about it.

I had become a literary fundamentalist.

TFT: A couple of things I really liked and was immediately drawn to in The Adderall Diaries were your transitions and your compression of time, which gives it an incredible amount of energy. Do you work with a specific eye towards achieving those ends?

SE: That’s nice of you to say. Honestly, I don’t work with a specific eye toward any end. I just write and write and edit and edit, like many creative writers do, and slowly a story emerges. Though that’s not always true. Sometimes a story doesn’t emerge. Twice I’ve spent a year on a book only to realize it wasn’t going to work. I don’t know how else to write. That’s why I don’t pitch books. I don’t know what they’re going to become but whatever my initial thoughts might be, the finished product rarely bears a resemblance to it.

TFT: Are there any writers you’ve read who when you first read them made you feel that you were allowed to write the way you wanted to write?

SE: Well, early on it was Charles Bukowski all the way. He was a total outsider and he wrote about himself, but he made it interesting. Reading Bukowski was a revelation. I was also really into [Jack] Kerouac’s On The Road and I loved Nelson Algren who said something along the lines of, “Sometimes the poor and uneducated are also stupid and mean.”

A little later I arrived in San Francisco and started reading with the open mic poets there like Daphne Gottlieb. I read Valencia by Michelle Tea and that blew my mind.

I was a history major in college and I used to look down at all the English students reading Raymond Carver. I thought they didn’t know anything. But I was the one that didn’t know anything. Finally, in my late twenties I started to get really into Raymond Carver and Tobias Wolff. I started to see all the things that were going on behind their sentences. I wanted to do that. I became obsessed with showing and not telling. Especially as it comes to motives.

But I passed through that as well. More recently I read Stoner by John Williams. It’s a perfect book. Williams knows when to show and when to tell. I had become too dogmatic about showing and not telling. I had become a literary fundamentalist, which is a very boring thing. Williams is one of the writers that snapped me out of that. And Chelsea Girls by Eileen Myles kind of helped me get back to where I was when I started writing. Chelsea Girls reminded me of the “why,” which is always important.

Because television is the intersection of art and business and there is no intersection of art and business.

TFT: What was the impetus behind starting The Rumpus? Will writers ever make money from work they publish online? And what do you think a model that enables that will look like?

SE: The impetus behind starting The Rumpus was finishing The Adderall Diaries and not having anything else to do with my life. I don’t know about writers making money online; I don’t know about writers making money. I’ve written seven books, I’m thirty-seven years old, and still I share a big one-bedroom apartment with two roommates. The literary writers I know are making a living teaching in universities, or writing business documents on the side. The vast majority of literary writers have never been able to make a living just from writing. I think it’s been that way for as long as I’ve been writing and I don’t know if that will ever change.

If you want to be a literary writer you have to do it for a reason other than money. That’s if you’re going to be someone like me who really only writes what he wants to write. I’m lucky that I can scrape by doing this. But I would never do it for the money. This past year I got involved in a project that seemed really fun, but there were business people involved. It was a television show about something I was actually interested in. But creatively it was a disaster. Because television is the intersection of art and business and there is no intersection of art and business.

So that doesn’t exactly answer your question. I think it’s possible for literary writers to supplement their income with writing and hopefully that will happen online. But the people with money, the businessmen, will never understand the value of the art to the artist. Money is not a good reason to get into creative writing.

TFT: You briefly published The Rumpus on Amazon’s Kindle. What was that experience like, working with Amazon?

SE: I’ve met some people that work at Amazon that I really like but ultimately Amazon is an evil, predatory corporation. This is really highlighted with their policy toward publishing blogs on the kindle. If someone subscribes to your blog on the kindle you get 30% and they get 70%. On the one hand it’s money you didn’t have. On the other hand it’s insulting that you would do all the work and create all the content and they would keep 70%. I’d rather give it away for free.

TFT: Has the publishing process of The Adderall Diaries been any different than that of your other books?

SE: Yes and no. This is my seventh book and every time you publish a book it’s different. I’ve also edited four books, so I really have eleven experiences. My editor for this book, Ethan Nosowsky, is a fantastic editor. Dave Eggers edited Happy Baby and he’s a genius. It was Dave’s idea to tell the story backwards, for example. Ethan is an entirely different kind of editor from Dave. He’s really hands on. I could call Ethan anytime and say, “I think I’m going to move this paragraph in the third chapter,” and he would know exactly what I was talking about.

I was much more involved with the publishing of this book than I was with my other books. I’ve learned over time that nobody in publishing knows anything, myself included. I used to defer to editors and designers and publicists, I don’t do that anymore. I got Alvaro Villanueva to design the cover. He’s one of the very best book designers in the world, in my opinion. I didn’t tell Graywolf [Press] Alvaro was designing the cover, I just sent them the design one day. Of course, the great thing about Graywolf, is they’re willing to put up with me and let me be closely involved. A more corporate house would probably have locked me out. I can be kind of annoying.

A girl I had dated previously was also on the set, and Madeline was there with these two naked guys on chains.

TFT: What’s been the best thing about working with Graywolf Press?

SE: Everything’s great about Graywolf. First, they’re a non-profit. The only reason they publish a book is because they love it. All these corporate presses have become corrupt, and lost sight of why they exist in the first place. If you consider yourself an artist you’re always going to be happier with a publisher like Graywolf or McSweeney’s.

The first best thing about Graywolf, as I mentioned, is Ethan Nosowsky. I turned down significantly more money from Norton to go with Graywolf and Ethan was the main reason for that. But I like everybody there, Fiona [McCrae], Erin [Kottke], Marisa [Atkinson]. We’re on the same page as far as what’s important to us.

TFT: I’m curious about your decision to go with Graywolf over Norton, and your statement, “A more corporate house would probably have locked me out.” I think I understand what you mean, but I don’t want to impose my reasoning on your statement. Would you humor me and be a little more specific about what you meant with that statement, and about your decision to choose a small press over a large one.

SE: Well, Norton offered more money. It was an incredibly difficult decision. I struggled with it for a week. It felt counter-intuitive to take less money from a smaller press. But Ethan had edited some of my favorite books. Also, it was a lot of money for Graywolf and maybe not so much for Norton, so there was the big fish small pond thing. And I just felt that Graywolf wanted it more. The editor at Norton wasn’t available to talk to me about the book for close to a week, so I knew I wasn’t a priority there.

At the time I was selling the book I was only 80% done. I didn’t really know yet what the book was about. So the most important consideration for me was who was going to help me finish the book so that the book was the best book it could possibly be. That has definitely borne out. When you publish a book and you can tell yourself this is as good a book as I’m capable of writing, then it’s hard to regret any of the decisions that got you to that point. And I definitely feel that way about The Adderall Diaries.

TFT: You’ve edited four books. What was the most challenging thing for you as an editor? And what was the most rewarding thing for you as an editor?

SE: I edited one book for McSweeney’s, Where To Invade Next. That’s an incredible book. I also edited two books of politically inspired fiction for MacAdam/Cage and one book of politically inspired erotica, Sex For America, for Harper Perennial. What I love about editing is soliciting work from writers I love. Especially when they’re not well known writers. I love editing. I’ve spent the last nine months doing more editing than writing. It’s really fulfilling. Though I wouldn’t want to do it for hire. I’m only interested in editing for books I’m putting together or for The Rumpus.

TFT: What is a typical (if there is such a thing) day in the life of Stephen Elliott? If there is no typical day, let’s say yesterday…

SE: Yesterday was a little crazy. I’ve been doing some work with Kink.com. I can’t go into too much detail about that. I ended up participating in this live porn shoot celebrating the opening of The Upper Floor. Porn is not really my thing, but there was no way around it. I’d been having some kind of affair, or relationship, with Maitress Madeline, who runs the Men In Pain website. A girl I had dated previously was also on the set, and Madeline was there with these two naked guys on chains. Madeline’s girlfriend was also part of the porn shoot and she was naked and chatting with the customers online and for a while I was her desk. Then I got smacked around quite a bit. So now I’m in a porn, again.

That was yesterday. But tomorrow might be more typical. Tomorrow I’m going to do some writing, then work on The Rumpus. And in the evening I’m going to meet three friends and we’re going to play bridge.

When news broke that Shane Jones was being picked up by Penguin, my first question to Jones was, How does your publisher  feel about this? To my surprise, Jones said, “He’s involved in the whole process—absolutely.” Adam Robinson, aka Publishing Genius Press, nurtured Jones and Light Boxes and helped make it what it is today, not only a work of great heart and craftsmanship, but a book that’s been optioned by Spike Jonze, picked up by Penguin and the first print run of which is already sold out. Jones is also now represented by bigwig agent Bill Clegg (who counts among his clients Rivka Galchen and Nick Flynn). On the heels of Shane’s string of successes, there have been the unsurprising and unimaginative slurs that Jones is “selling out.”  Are writers drawn to indie publishers for the so-called benefit of “nurturing,” for the preservation of literary integrity, freedom and expression unalloyed by market demands? Or are those elements an illusion that masks a deeper, less noble reality that a writer goes with an indie publisher because at this point in his career no one bigger will take him on? What better person to get to the heart of the matter with than Robinson, the man behind PGP who discovered Jones and who was the cornerstone without which Jones’s rise wouldn’t have been possible.

THE FASTER TIMES: Are you Publishing Genius Press?

ADAM ROBINSON: Yep, all along I have been PG. I started the press in the fall of 2006 when I started my MFA at the University of Baltimore, which sort of has a focus on publishing. The focus is actually on the value of the creative mindset over “cred.” I was assigned to stretch the concept of a book for a class, so I made an outdoor poetry journal, which I have kept doing. It’s now in its sixth issue, and it’s called isReads. I had always wanted to publish “actual” books too (which is what drew me to the program at UB), so I started doing that at about the same time, in staple-stitch chapbooks.

TFT: How did you discover Shane? How did the two of you get into contact?

ADAM ROBINSON: Shane submitted LB to me “over the transom” in the early summer of 2008, after I had done two staple-stitch chapbooks and two perfect bound collections. I think what probably brought his attention to Publishing Genius was my chapbook series, called This PDF Chapbook (now called A Genius Chapbook). I had published Blake Butler in the series by then, and I think it was Blake who suggested Shane send his manuscript to me. Actually, now that I think of it, Shane said in his query that Joseph, from Caketrain, recommended he send it to Publishing Genius. But at the time I was gratified by the thought. Still, it went into the slush pile for a couple months.

I told Shane I really liked his story, but no thanks, because I wanted to do a book by a woman…. He wrote back saying that he isn’t a big jock and he doesn’t “go around punching people in the face.”

TFT: Light Boxes was the first novel published by PGP. Why did you decide to go with Light Boxes for your first novel? As you only publish one book per year (to my understanding), it must have been a big decision on your part. Had you envisioned making the foray into novels at some point?

ADAM ROBINSON: The cool thing about LB was that it came in at a time when I was looking to do a longer book. In fact, I was looking to do a twenty-thousand word story, which is pretty much dead on what LB is, but the reason Shane’s manuscript went into the slush pile was because I also wanted to publish a woman. I told Shane I really liked his story, but no thanks, because I wanted to do a book by a woman (because most of what I had on my calendar was men). He wrote back saying that he isn’t a big jock and he doesn’t “go around punching people in the face,” and that he thought there were some really strong female characters in the book. So — since I didn’t have a bunch of other twenty-thousand word manuscripts at the time — I gave LB a closer look. I didn’t know him at all then, but a little research showed that he’d published in some places I respected, like Greying Ghost, and he did a good job promoting that work, so I accepted Light Boxes.

To be clear, I was aiming to publish about four paperback books a year. Still from the first few email exchanges with Shane, I knew I wanted to make LB the “flagship” book. His ambition was really evident, our aesthetics were really aligned, and I knew I could count on him to be diligent in working with me on the editing and promotion. He was easy to work with at every step and he motivated me to work hard for the sake of LB.

TFT: The layout and design of Light Boxes is unique. The fonts are gigantic and small, serif and sans serif. One page might have on it nothing but three tiny words that you can only read by pressing your face up to the book. Can you explain a little about the process of designing the book and why you made some of the decisions you made?

ADAM ROBINSON: As for creating the look of the book, that was one of the first things Shane wanted to talk about. He was very driven about having a nice cover, and of course the design is always really important to me. I got the sense that Shane wasn’t afraid to ask for anything, and because we communicated so much (sometimes dozens of emails a day) I wanted to do whatever I could to make great things happen. (As an aside, I discovered today that this excited communication is really what drives me: I’m working on the next book, Easter Rabbit by Joe Young, and he and I have been writing back and forth and that has directly contributed to my level of excitement.)

So anyway, the process for Light Boxes was kind of ludicrous. Shane and I would just send pictures back and forth to each other of artists we liked, like baseball cards or something. Eventually I asked an old friend, a very successful painter, if we could use on of her images. She said yes, but then Shane found a young guy whose drawings he loved and so we signed him on. Then we decided his work was too spare for the lushness of the book, so we paid that young guy a kill fee and approached another designer who was really responsive but ultimately was way off target and, since he was a big name, I had to pay him the entire fee. Man, he was cool but he was pissed. We asked Jeff Clark, the guy behind pretty much every poetry book you look at and want to die for, and he was willing to negotiate but by that time I felt like it would have broke the bank.

Ultimately it came down to the fact that I had found a picture, I think on Chris Higgs’s site “Bright Stupid Confetti,” by an artist in the UK and was able to make it work. I had to pay that dude in pounds sterling, via wire transfer. This whole cover thing was really costly considering in the end I did it myself, with the help of Stephanie Barber, for free.
I remember when I showed Shane my idea for the cover and he said, “That’s the cover of my book.” Then I did the page layout and was really happy that Shane was happy. He had put in colored type for the words he wanted big and small, and I made some suggestions for that, and the page design went really smoothly. Thank goodness. That was a really long answer, but I think you’re the first one who asked so I was glad to get it out.

TFT: You’re an indie publisher, and you shelled out all this cash, in one case pounds sterling, for images that you never used. May I ask how you funded this exercise in overscrupulous taste?

ADAM ROBINSON: Well, to clarify, I did use the image that I paid pounds sterling for, but that is because I saw it before buying it. I bought the image but then changed it and did the layout stuff myself (with my friend Stephanie). But sure enough, Nicholas Huge took the picture. Isn’t it crazy that it’s a photograph? If you look at the native file, and blow it up really big, you can see detail in the snow in those branches.

Anyway, more to your question, I have always been advancing money for Publishing Genius from my day job. Thankfully, with every book I’ve been able to pay myself back, or at least get close. With LB it’s been difficult, but it’s amazing how close we came, given how much money went into it. It’s like the summer blockbuster of small press books. I’m still paying off Shane’s caterer from that third week of rewrites.

It might make sense if Shane was, like, a Christian band and got an offer to be Sepultura’s road manager or something, but I never thought that small press writers published with small presses for some nebulous ethical reason.

TFT: How did you learn the news about Penguin wanting to pick up Shane’s book? And what did you think about it?

ADAM ROBINSON: So right after the news exploded about Spike Jonze picking up the book, I got an email from someone at Penguin asking if I wanted to sell the rights to the “movie tie-in edition.” That was awesome and made me giddy. At the same time, though, I felt really incapable of actually dealing with it because, well for one thing, Shane and I never had a contract so I was pretty sure I didn’t own the rights to sell. I mean, geez, six months ago we were talking about how six hundred copies might have been too many to print. So legal stuff, logistics, I felt unprepared. My hands trembled a lot when I read the Penguin email, and I felt kind of small telling the acquisitions editor there that I didn’t know how it worked but he should contact Shane because he owned everything that we didn’t sell to Spike Jonze. That was another thing. I signed something with the movie people that said I didn’t have any interest in all these things, like theme park rides and video games and fast food promos or whatever, so I still don’t even really know what I’m allowed to do. Can I make a t-shirt that says, “I read Light Boxes before you?”

Soon after Penguin came knocking, an agent approached Shane. I just figured that’s perfect, he’ll look out for things. I had already told Shane that I wanted all good things to happen as smoothly as possible. I definitely did not want to stand in the way or make things difficult. This wasn’t just, like, complete generosity or naivete on my part, though. Over the course of the last year working with him on the book, I felt very clearly that I could trust Shane to look out for me, too. And he has, I think. More than whatever money and attention this brings to Genius, I’m honestly most gratified by the coolness that is possible in people.

TFT: You and shane didn’t have a contract? Do you mean you didn’t have a written contract, or you hadn’t come to an agreement at all on details like how you’d divide profits?

ADAM ROBINSON: We actually had a signed agreement that I wrote, which I thought covered all the possible situations. It said things like, “Art direction is the purview of the publisher but Shane can get a say in stuff too,” and “Anything that isn’t described here will be settled at the discretion of the publisher so as not to be a jerk.” And yeah, we had agreed to splitting profits evenly. I keep really good books and it’s clear that, thanks largely to selling through Amazon’s consignment system, we’ll be splitting $0 right down the middle.

TFT: Jones has been clear that you’ve been very supportive of his move to Penguin. This is great to hear. But I’m wondering if there’s any part of you that believes he should have stuck with you, because you stuck with him and worked so hard for him? Or that somehow he’s giving up the integrity or sold out on the ideal that made him seek out an indie publisher to begin with.

ADAM ROBINSON: I do think that Shane has stuck with me. I mean, like, we did talk about whether or not I should reprint but before we got far into that conversation I made it clear that I didn’t necessarily want to. LB is a beast, it’s more than I can handle, and I know that. It was driving me crazy, working to fulfill orders and track Paypal sales and everything. I don’t have the infrastructure set up to handle the attention LB was bringing in during its last weeks in stock here. I’m really enjoying the attention I get, and I’m working hard to be able to parlay it into something I can build on for the future of Publishing Genius. But I’m relieved to be out from under Light Boxes. I can spend some time now paying attention to the rest of my catalog and getting new books made, which is what I really love.

And plus, if Shane stuck with Publishing Genius, you probably wouldn’t be interviewing me right now, and what good would that do me? I’d still have a hundred copies of the book in my tiny apartment. I don’t know if that sounds phony, though. There is absolutely a part of me that is jealous that Shane gets to keep the attention and after a few months only the same twenty people who already cared will pay any attention to Publishing Genius.

As for the integrity issue, I don’t really understand that. I don’t know what integrity comes from only working with small presses. The idea of Shane selling out never occurred to me. Now that a few people have joked about it I have thought about it a (very) little, and it doesn’t make any sense. It might make sense if Shane was, like, a Christian band and got an offer to be Sepultura’s road manager or something, but I never thought that small press writers published with small presses for some nebulous ethical reason. I can’t think of a coherent argument that can be made for that, unless a writer is forced somehow to compromise his work when signing on with a big house. But does that happen? It’s not like Josie and the Pussycats, where Shane writes a nice story and then the publisher puts it through a machine to insert a bunch of hooks in order to commodify it. The commodity that Shane gives the publisher is the product that the publisher gives the world. If there are people who are only buying small press books because they think that there’s some value to it aside from the quality of the writing, they’re mistaken. People should read the best books, always, regardless of who publishes them.

So at the same time that I was thrilled, I was also thinking, “There’s no way this can happen.”

TFT: I’m aware from my correspondence with Shane that you did nurture his career quite a bit, in the editing and promotion. Do you think that writers seek out indie publishers for the benefit of this type of nurturing?

ADAM ROBINSON: I’m grateful that Shane credits me with the editing part of my work, because that was where I contributed the most of myself in this project. But I think people seek out indie publishers, first of all, because the mainstream houses are so unapproachable, especially for new writers. I know that if I submit a story to the New Yorker, all I’m going to get is a form rejection letter. But if I submit it to New York Tyrant or something, there’s a chance I’ll get a letter back from Gian saying, “Nice story, I really liked how the guy killed that dog at the end, but it doesn’t work for me right now.”

TFT: What was it like for you when Spike Jonze contacted you and Shane? It seems from your earlier response that it was something you didn’t have a whole lot of experience with. What was the most important thing you learned from your dealings with selling the film rights?

ADAM ROBINSON: By the time I got an email from an intern at the production company saying that they were interested and they wanted my phone number, LB had already received some pretty good attention and wild offers. Someone from Kunstmann, a big German press, was reading it in consideration of a translation, and there was a Croatian offer too. So I wasn’t like, “This is clearly a joke” — except for the fact that it was Spike Jonze. I mean, given the way that LB works, so clearly influenced by the metafictive elements in Jonze’s work, I couldn’t imagine a better person to be interested. So at the same time that I was thrilled, I was also thinking, “There’s no way this can happen.”

Aside from “forget about your expectations, just work hard,” I would advise any indie publisher to be clear at the beginning of every project exactly what rights the press owns and what the author owns. It’s amazing how complicated this can be. There are standards in place that I’m still not entirely clear on, but I’m grateful to Peter Cole, who runs Keyhole, for letting me crib his standard contract, and to Michael Kimball, an author who’s very familiar with intellectual property contracts, for advising me on a lot of this. The way I worked with this movie deal, just like the Penguin deal, was very naive — thinking, “Don’t let me be an obstacle, if there’s any chance this deal can get done, I want to do it” — and now that I’ve had a chance to look at some contract issues, I feel like there’s a whole business side to things that is in place to take some of that naive anxiety away. You know, like, in the business world people are more inclined to relax a bit, get things done by 5 or by Friday, whatevs, whereas I’m always like, “I’ve only got an hour before band practice, if this thing doesn’t happen now it’s not going to happen at all.” In actuality, I missed a phone call from the Director of Development at the film company and didn’t call her back for three days and it was no big deal. People are awesome.

TFT: How much of your decision to go with a book, let’s say Shane’s, is based on the hope of discovering an obscure masterpiece, as opposed to a desire to attain a work that will actually sell? How much of each factors into your decision–if you can estimate a percentage?

ADAM ROBINSON: When I love a writer’s work, it doesn’t matter to me that much whether or not it will sell. This sounds crazy or whatever but really, since I’ve been doing most of the work myself and only printing a couple hundred copies to start, there’s no way I’m losing more money than I do in a month of Saturday nights. In 2010 I’m putting out a book by Mairéad Byrne — in an amazing interview with Kent Johnson that isn’t online anymore she’s talking about the book sales for an Alan Dugan book. She says something like only 200 people are buying Dugan’s book, and she wishes she knew who they were. But then she says, “Well, actually, I bet I do know who they are.” That’s kind of the beauty of publishing books the way I do. Ultimately, the investment is small but the community is giant.

So I would estimate that 95% is based on the work and 5% is hope that it will sell. Actually, 75% is based on the work, 5% is hope that it will sell, 10% is because of some unquantifiable sense, and 10% is based on awesome.

TFT: There’s a rumor that some copies of Light Boxes will be made available through Small Press Distribution. True?

ADAM ROBINSON: Ha, there were some at SPD, but they sold in one day. I think they sold sixty or something in a day. There are some at BN.com, I think, and there are some at bookstores scattered across the country.