Ouraudio series "The Authors Read. We Listen." was hatched in a NYC club during BEA back in 2012. It's a fun little series, where authors record themselves reading an excerpt from their own novels, in their own voices, the way their stories were meant to be heard.
Today, Lee Martin will be reading an excerpt from his newest collection The Mutual UFO Network, which released June 12th. He is the author of the novels, The
Bright Forever, River
of Heaven; Quakertown;Break
the Skin, and Late One Night. He has also published three
memoirs, From Our House,Turning Bones, and Such a Life. His first book was the short story collection, The
Least You Need to Know. He is the co-editor of Passing the Word: Writers on Their Mentors, and the author of Telling Stories: The Craft of Narrative and
the Writing Life. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in such places
as Harper’s, Ms., Creative Nonfiction, The Georgia Review, The Kenyon
Review, Fourth Genre, River Teeth, The Southern Review, Prairie Schooner, Glimmer Train, The Best American
Mystery Stories, and The Best American Essays. He is the
winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction and fellowships from the
National Endowment for the Arts and the Ohio Arts Council. He teaches in the
MFA Program at The Ohio State University, where he is a College of Arts and
Sciences Distinguished Professor of English and a past winner of the Alumni
Award for Distinguished Teaching.
Click on the soundcloud bars below to listen to Lee read from his collection:
What it's about:
In The Mutual UFO Network, Pulitzer Prize finalist and master of the craft Lee Martin presents his first short story collection since his acclaimed debut The Least You Need to Know. With Martin's signature insight, each story peers into the nooks and crannies of seemingly normal homes, communities, and families. The footprints of a midnight prowler peel back the veneer of a marriage soured by a long-ago affair. A con man selling faked UFO footage loses his wife to the promise of life outside the ordinary. And a troubled man, tormented by his own mind, lies in the street to look at the stars, and in doing so unravels the carefully constructed boundaries between his quiet neighbors.
From friendship and family to all forms of love, The Mutual UFO Network explores the intricacies of relationships and the possibility for redemption in even the most complex misfits and loners.
Disclaimer: The Page 69 Test is not mine. It has been around since 2007, asking authors to compare page 69 against the meat of the actual story it is a part of. I loved the whole idea of it and so I'm stealing it specifically to showcase small press titles - novels, novellas, short story collections, the works! So until the founder of The Page 69 Test calls a cease and desist, let's do this thing....
This is from the second chapter, and it picks up partway
through a visual survey of the Jane Austen Society of North America's public
market at the society's annual summit. In film terms, what you're seeing here
is a portion of a tracking shot.
What is Camp Austen about?
It's a reported work of narrative nonfiction, all about the
rhapsodic (and occasionally riotous) world of Jane Austen superfans. The book
also doubles as a family memoir: Austen is very important to my mother's side
of the family, and I use these family reflections to illuminate the larger
world of Austen enthusiasts. I also offer short analyses of Austen's novels,
and of her biography, that help explain why so many readers find themselves
singularly drawn to Austen. A lot of Austen conferences are like a big party
among a boisterous extended family, and I want readers to enjoy eavesdropping
on the party as much as possible.
Do you think this page is a good reflection of the book
overall? Does it align itself with the book's overall theme?
I think it does! You see most of the book's concerns here:
the flirting, the crowdsourced costume advice, the radical democracy of the
fan-fiction world, the sheer characters who inhabit this universe
dedicated to Jane (“Stone Cold Jane Austen”!). Also, Janeites place a
charmingly serious emphasis on apparent trivia, and I think we get a flavor of
that on the page in question (furled vs. unfurled umbrellas, etc.). This page
is more of a catalogue or epic list than most pages in the book, and you'll
find more slapstick elsewhere, but I think this offers a representative taste.
CAMP AUSTEN: MY LIFE AS AN ACCIDENTAL JANE AUSTEN SUPERFAN
[… Ed]ward Taylor, upon whom (the
Austen letters indicate) Austen had “fondly doted.” Women and men dressed as
period haberdashers will remain in character while pressing homemade bonnets
upon you; other people dressed as period haberdashers do not remain in
character but nonetheless press homemade bonnets upon you.
Outside
the market, authors perch behind a row of tables, selling and signing books and
answering questions from their public. At one table, several of the world’s
most decorated Austen scholars share sympathy over their colleagues’ physical
ailments while fielding breathless questions from graduate students for whom
the presence of these scholars has the effect of an oracular experience. Four
tables to their right, another author is peddling romantic spin-offs of the
Austen novels—there is even a subset of fan-fiction predicated on subtextual
homoeroticism in the original books; you wouldn’t believe what Darcy and
Bingley get up to when the rest of Netherfield is asleep—and, to her right, two
authors are signing mystery novels (The
Suspicion at Sanditon!). If you poked your head in from the street, you
might meet Devoney Looser, a professor at Arizona State University and an
accomplished roller-derbyist who, when she’s on skates, goes by the moniker
“Stone Cold Jane Austen.” Depending on the year, you might bump into John
Mullan, a perceptive critic of Austen who has also answered one of the enduring
questions of Austenworld: How many umbrellas appear in the novels? How many of them
are furled? (The answers are seven and six, respectively.)
Bio: Ted Scheinman is based in Southern California, where he works as senior editor at Pacific Standard magazine. His essays and reporting have appeared in the New York Times, the Oxford American, the Paris Review, Playboy, Slate, and elsewhere. His first book, Camp Austen: My Life as an Accidental Jane Austen Superfan, is available via Farrar, Straus & Giroux/FSG Originals.
Books & Booze challenges participating authors to make up their own drinks, name and all, or create a drink list for their characters and/or readers using drinks that already exist.
Today, Scott Navicky is throwing all the booze at the his recently released new book 3Essays onImagereality.
When
drinking absinthe, it is essential to be mindful of not only what you’re
drinking, but when you are drinking it. Drinking absinthe too late in the evening
can be an invitation to riotous escapades. The traditional Parisian l’heure verte, or “the green hour,” was
five o’clock. Observing l’heure verte
transformed me from an evening drinker into an afternoon drinker, and this
transformation opened up a plethora of new drink possibilities. For example, I
adore Irish Coffee and steadfastly maintain that a well-timed Irish Coffee can
save your life, but I’m often underwhelmed by its presentation. The temperature
tends to be too tepid and it’s usually gone too soon. To avoid this
disappointment, I create a Barry Barry
Barry Bonds, Y’all. Don’t bother looking this drink up in Mr. Boston: The Official Bartender’s Guide because
it’s not in there. I conjured it. The recipe is wonderfully simple:
1
espresso
1
pint of Guinness
Simply
pour the espresso into the Guinness & enjoy
But
don’t be misled by the simplicity of this creation: finding a good Barry Barry Barry Bonds, Y’all isn’t
easy. You either have to locate the perfect proximity between coffeeshop and
pub, or stumble upon a bar that offers both good espresso and Guinness on tap. One
of my favorite Barry Barry Barry Bonds,
Y’all bars is named Nighttown after a famous Joycean portmanteau. (Within
the Circe chapter of Ulysses, Nighttown is Joyce’s rechristening
of Dublin’s red-light district, known to local Dubliners as Monto.)
Circe is foregrounded by a drinking
party at the National Maternity Hospital. When the party becomes too raucous,
the revelers, including both Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom, relocate across
the street to Burke’s Pub, where Stephen begins ordering absinthe. Immediately
after Stephen places this order, an ominous toast appears in Latin.
Translation:
We will all drink green poison, and the
devil take the hindmost.
The
woozy wobblers stay at Burke’s until chuckingout time. When the entourage
spills out onto the street, the scene is set for absinthe’s finest hour. No
other author has been able to so playfully portray absinthe’s lucid beauty
alongside its accused lurid vulgarity.
Easily
the longest chapter within the novel, Circe
is a delight for quotehounds. Lewd
chimpanzees wander the streets, as the
famished snaggletusks of an elderly bawd protrude from a doorway. In the
middle of a lengthy hallucination, Leopold Bloom vows to build the new Bloomusalem. The ghost of poor Paddy
Dignam appears via metempsychosis. Leopold Bloom speaks to his dead father,
while Stephen is confronted by his mother’s undead spirit. Amidst all of this
greenmadness, a Hobgoblin appears kangaroohopping,
and the beardless face of William Shakespeare appears in a hallway mirror to
crow Iagogogo!
This
is exactly why you shouldn’t drink absinthe too late in the evening. Of course,
James Joyce might not agree. An anythingarian boozehound with a preference for Swiss
wine from the Neuchâtel region, James Joyce insisted on never drinking before
the sun went down.
Scott
Navicky is the author of 3Essays on
Imagereality (Montag Press, 2018) and Humboldt:
Or, The Power of Positive Thinking (Chicago Center for Literature and
Photography, 2014).He attended
Denison University and the University of Auckland, where he was awarded an
Honors Master’s Degree in art history with a focus on photography theory. He
currently lives in Columbus, Ohio.
Disclaimer:The Page 69 Test is not mine. It has been around since 2007, asking authors to compare page 69 against the meat of the actual story it is a part of. I loved the whole idea of it and so I'm stealing it specifically to showcase small press titles - novels, novellas, short story collections, the works! So until the founder of The Page 69 Test calls a cease and desist, let's do this thing....
Page 69 tells of the first time Greg
Dombrowski meets John H. Walker, the local legend recently diagnosed with terminal
leukemia. In the memory, Greg confesses his infatuation with Erika Summerson,
the young girl whose murder sparks the novel.
Here Greg struggles through his hypermasculinity
to express his feelings for Erika while he and Walker bond over a game of
HORSE. Their time together gives Walker license to later ask Greg to join the
group that searches for Erika’s killer.
What is Into
That Good Night about?
Into
That Good Night is a story about a group of kids who become inseparable
friends when a girl they love is murdered in the woods behind town. They bond while
scouring a secluded section of the valley for clues to close her unsolved
murder. They are soon harassed by a person they believe to be the killer. United
against a common enemy, the group strikes back. Through the haze of adolescence
in a predominantly white, working-class American suburb, the novel’s underdog
protagonist Doug Horolez must then decide whether or not to help the only
friends he’s ever known in their quest for peace and justice.
Do you think
this page is a good reflection of the book overall? Does it align itself with
the book’s overall theme?
Greg’s point of view is one of seven in the novel. This excerpt snapshots
his white cis hetero adolescence, mid-attempt to figure it all out—the new and raw
emotions, the transience of relationships, Life, his talents and passions, with
his intense attraction to Erika underpinning every thought.
The excerpt reflects the novel in that it illustrates an adolescent
mind trying to make sense of the world passed on to their generation.
Trying to make sense of existence is the work before us all to our
last days, I think. Adolescence is a special time because many of us start to
ask big questions and our observations are in some ways less bullshit than what
we tell ourselves in adulthood, misbelieving we have all the answers.
I hope readers find the group’s outlook as refreshing as I did and
fall in love with at least one of these unlikely and tragic heroes.
cool to see him turn up alone on
Greg’s court at Penny Park one November night, before Erika had died. The
halogen floodlight mounted to the telephone pole behind the backboard had
already whited-out the world beyond the court, right before Greg was about to
head home, when the swings creaked. Greg saw nothing, then jumped—startled by
the Dead Man on the sideline. Buried in a scarf and the hood of his parka, his
face looked bloodless, zombiefied. The kid had cancer or something. Still,
meeting Walker was worth skipping dinner for. They played HORSE. Greg won, but
the game wasn’t a sweep. Walker might’ve had a chance if he’d stopped gabbing
and focused when he had the ball. Greg remembered the kid asking after the
winning shot if there was anything he loved more than basketball. Greg had said
no. Greg then mentioned Erika, like some big stalker. He kept shooting,
stripped down to his jersey and shorts, his body heat worked up, trying hard
not to listen too hard to the bundled kid on the sidelines pushing with the
personal questions, as though somehow he knew how sick Greg’s heart was for
her, the guy saying, “Erika … Erika …” with these floats of white breath that
Greg dodged on his way to the hoop, as if she would materialize out of one if
the kid wasn’t dying and had a few ounces better lung capacity. Greg couldn’t
shoot worth a shit, then, too afraid it could happen, which was dumb because of
how badly he wished it would—until an hour later, when they were drinking hot
Gatorade teas together—he and John H. Walker drinking Greg’s own winter game
elixir, no shit—outside of 7-Eleven, like buddies, and Greg admitted wanting to
love someone as much as he loved the game. “Something bigger,” Walker said and
admitted he knew the feeling. Greg walked home that night with true respect for
the kid, though feeling kinda that he’d gabbed and hardly let Walker speak,
which wasn’t his style. Sharing feelings wasn’t his style. Still. So when the
guy came up to him yesterday to say there might be a way to help Erika, he
must’ve already known Greg would say yes.
The kids dug until daylight fled the
crowns of the trees. All that time, they plodded with their long-handled
shovels in the well-rooted earth while John went around saying, “Deeper.
No—close. A little deeper.” Each thanked him for his feedback to be kind. They
figured his condition made physical labor risky—everyone except E.
Levis Keltner is
a writer, musician, editor, and educator from Chicago and living in Austin,
Texas. He is the author of Into That Good
Night (Skyhorse, 2018). His short fiction has appeared in Bull: Men's
Fiction. He is the editor-in-chief of Newfound and teaches writing at Texas
State University.
In the Fall of 2017, in anticipation of the publication of my novel, Cloud Diary, I began approaching musicians about responding to short scenes from the novel in any manner they chose. By early 2018, 19 musicians had responded with 25 original pieces.
Writing, music, art: they don’t travel in a straight line. The roots of their narrative tunnel and curl, vanish and re-appear, spreading outward, never quite resting. It’s impossible to say exactly what art does, and while the arts speak to our connectedness, they also accentuate the vast gulfs between us: the breadth of interpretation, of response, and the uniqueness of that response.
Sometimes, in my process of writing, it happens that a piece of music takes on a value. It’s not an inspiration exactly, but it stakes out an emotional territory that’s not obvious or causal. An innocent bystander might never see the connection, but the music helps to form an interior landscape I return to throughout the writing.
Cloud Diary (C&R Press, 2018) is the story of Doug and Sophie, their intense relationship in their twenties, then eight years later when they meet again. Even before I’d begun the writing, Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane, Over the Seabecame an anchor for the early part of Doug and Sophie’s life together.
Raw, loose, and loud, Neutral Milk Hotel has a dangerous, wailing nakedness, the kind which might pivot in an instant into something necessitating an intervention. I wanted that feeling around Doug and Sophie: a messy vulnerability, a life with dirt in the corners, a life of rummaging in couch cushions for change to do laundry, of hoping your more established friends invite you to dinner because it’s two days before payday.
Yet, in contrast, I needed very quiet, still places within the book and a different kind of music could come into play then.
The story of Doug and Sophie is one of intimacy, and powerlessness in the face of tests upon that intimacy. It’s intensely personal, in that it’s focused almost solely upon them over eight years of their lives.
In the middle section of Cloud Diary, the tone changes, becoming quieter, a bit more melancholy, as Sophie and Doug meet again after their separation. Their meeting is tentative at first‑‑‑there’s a lot of history to address or avoid---then tender, then more demanding than either might have imagined. In the writing, Neutral Milk Hotel was replaced by Sigur Ros; very specific Sigur Ros tracks from a 2004 ep, BA BA TI KI DI DO. That’s what you’ve been listening to.
In Philip K. Dick’s short story, The Preserving Machine, Doc Labyrinth invents a machine that converts great music into living creatures. He’s concerned that Beethoven or Bach might not survive a coming apocalypse and believes that through this conversion they might be set free in the wild, fend for themselves, then be scooped up in the future and converted again into beautiful music.
[Scroll up and stop the Sigur Ros now. Scroll back down.]
[Start this music now.]
Things don’t go as planned. A year or two after releasing the various creatures into the nearby forest, Labyrinth finds every animal has changed in order to survive and flourish, and that to place the Bach bugs back into the Preserving Machine does not deliver Bach at all, but a whole new music.
As contributions to the Cloud Diary Music Project began to appear in my inbox, I was reminded of Dick’s story. All types of music were represented here, from barroom songs and bluegrass to electronica and avant-garde classical.
Each person who submitted knew very little about the book as a whole. They’d simply received a short scene and a three-sentence synopsis. (One likened it to peering through a hole in a construction fence. He could only see a couple of beams and girders, imagining the rest.) Each was creating something whole from a mere glimpse, in the same way a simple exchange overheard between strangers can become, for me, the basis of a short story.
The
music you're listening to now was written and performed (with Steve Sollod) by
Kim Church. Kim is a writer herself. It’s a response to a fictional scene written, in part, as a response to the music of Sigur Ros. In the scene, Doug and Sophie struggle with their future over a late night and a morning, working to rekindle old bonds, or perhaps establish new ones. There’s a darkness hanging over this scene. And a stillness.
When we write, we are translating feelings, images, conversations; we’re collating them, bringing them together, and then threading a needle of words to create something. It’s not a record, not a historical document; we are translating experience into another language.
This is what we do when we read. We gather the words and form our own images, feelings, history, even music, around them. They become our own. Every translation is different. Every read text is unique.
This is true even of our own work. Now, when I remember Sophie turning to Doug in the middle of that night and asking, quietly, “Can you just hold me. For a moment…”, I hear both Sigur Ros and Kim Church. They are distinct views of the same scene.
Because, once our creatures scuttle or dart from the nest they become their own beings and they, like Doc Labyrinth’s musical creations, will transform as they explore and chart the world for themselves.
With luck, they’ll learn to survive on their own. We may or may not recognize them when they do.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Kendra Harding’s Lover Leap was written in response to a different scene within Part Two of the book. Music for this piece: Lucy Dacus, Historian/ Big Thief, CapacitySteve Mitchell is the author of Cloud Diary and co-owner of Scuppernong Books in Greensboro, NC
Welcome to another installment of TNBBC's Where Writers Write!
Where Writers Write is a series in which authors showcase their writing spaces using short form essay, photos, and/or video. As a lover of books and all of the hard work that goes into creating them, I thought it would be fun to see where the authors roll up their sleeves and make the magic happen.
This is Robert
Lopez. He is the author of three novels, Part of the World, Kamby Bolongo
Mean River, and All Back Full, and two story collections, Asunder
and Good People. www.robertlopez.net
Where Robert Lopez Writes
This is where I work, when I work. This is also where I spend a
fair amount of time when I'm not working. I could never write in a cafe full of
people and the sounds they make. I'm distracted enough here alone, what with
the news and social media and all the other etceteras. I don't need real live
people crossing through my field of vision at the same time.
Books & Booze challenges participating authors to make up their own drinks, name and all, or create a drink list for their characters and/or readers using drinks that already exist.
Today, Isabelle Kenyon whips up a new drink in honor of her latest collection of poetry,
A starfruit garnish (think thick jungles and
exotic new tastes and topics)
Lemon juice (bittersweet
aftertaste)
I chose this drink
because the book is entirely based on my time in New Zealand - exotic greenery,
coastal beaches and fresh flavours. It was a time to cleanse the pallet so to
speak, after the funeral of my Grandma, and so the exciting new experiences were
often bittersweet.
Isabelle Kenyon is
the author of poetry anthology, This is not a Spectacle and micro chapbook, The
Trees Whispered, published by Origami Poetry Press. She is also the editor
of MIND Poetry Anthology 'Please Hear What I'm Not Saying' and her latest
release, Digging Holes To Another Continent, will be published by Clare
Songbirds Publishing House this May.
Bored with the same old fashioned author interviews you see all around the blogosphere? Well, TNBBC's got a fun, literary spin on the ole Would You Rather game. Get to know the authors we love to read in ways no other interviewer has. I've asked them to pick sides against the same odd bookish scenarios.
Suzanne Burns'
Would You Rather
Would you rather start every
sentence in your book with ‘And’ or end every sentence with ‘but’?
I
think starting every sentence with ‘and’ might end up reading like some sort of
exciting and very long list of announcements. To me, ‘but’ would read like an
overwrought and worrisome apology.
Would
you rather write in an isolated cabin that was infested with spiders or in a
noisy coffee shop with bad musak?
I
could handle the cabin during the day. I’m quick and excitable enough to fend off
any spider heading my way. Night, and sleep, and long hair is another story.
But I could never write with noise and bad, or even good, musak.
Would
you rather think in a language you could understand but write in one you
couldn’t read, or think in a language you couldn’t understand but write in one
you could read?
One
has to understand their own thoughts or they couldn’t write in any language.
Would
you rather write the best book of your career and never publish it or publish a
bunch of books that leave you feeling unsatisfied?
A
bunch of books that leave me feeling unsatisfied. That’s the constant state of
artists, isn’t it? Why else do we all keep going? But if I did write the best
book of my career and never published it, it wasn’t my best book.
Would you rather have everything you
think automatically appear on your Twitter feed or have a voice in your head
narrate your every move?
Twitter, because I’m not on it so would
never check it. That way when I get weird, think PMS when potato chips for
dinner combined with stalking exes on Facebook sounds like a good idea, I’d be
oblivious.
Would
you rather your books be bound and covered with human skin or made out of
tissue paper?
Tissue
paper. I have a suspicion that no one but my mom actually reads them cover to
cover, anyway, and she loves collecting tissue paper. She has a large wooden
box in the garage filled with the fluff.
Would you rather read naked in front of a packed room or have no
one show up to your reading?
I’ve had no one show up to a reading more than a few times, so I’m
a seasoned pro.
Would
you rather your book incite the world’s largest riot or be used as tinder in
everyone’s fireplace?
Who
doesn’t want to incite the world’s largest riot?
Would you rather give up your computer
or pens and paper?
Computer. I write longhand.
Would you rather have every word of your favorite novel tattooed
on your skin or always playing as an audio in the background for the rest of
your life?
I think Catcher in the Rye
would be a perfect fit.
Would
you rather meet your favorite author and have them turn out to be a total
jerkwad or hate a book written by an author you are really close to?
All
favorite authors are total jerkwads.
Would
you rather your book have an awesome title with a really ugly cover or an
awesome cover with a really bad title?
You
obviously haven’t see this book. This is real. Yes, she is floating over a tree
surrounded by a circular rainbow and yes, she has a shaved head and side boob.
Would
you rather write beautiful prose with no point or write the perfect story
badly?
Beautiful
prose with no point, like Proust.
Would
you rather write only embarrassingly truthful essays or write nothing at all?
How
embarrassing? I don’t have to mention that one time I did that one thing, right?
Would
you rather your book become an instant best seller that burns out quickly and
is forgotten forever or be met with mediocre criticism but continue to sell
well after you’re gone?
Instant,
forgettable, burned out bestseller.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Suzanne Burns writes both
fiction and prose. Her fiction most recently appeared in The Chicago Tribune.
Her second short story collection, The Veneration of Monsters, published by
Dzanc Books, received a starred Kirkus Review and went on to be named one of
the Top 100 Fiction Titles of 2017. She is currently working on a new short
story collection.
“Being persecuted is not just a physical trial. It is one
that affects you intellectually. The reality of it slowly deforms you and
attacks, above all, your sense of proportion.”
So says the anonymous narrator of the powerful novel For
Two Thousand Years as he reflects on his time as a university student in
1920s Romania. But this book belies those words. Even as he and fellow Jewish
students are assaulted daily, he seeks to understand himself, his attackers,
and his own response to their anti-Semitism. The strength of this book is found
in its clear-eyed reporting of conversations the narrator has with friends and
colleagues – their candid brutality at times stunning – combined with his thoughtful
reflection on what he hears and sees.
Originally published in Romanian in 1934, this novel by
Mihail Sebastian has been available in French for some time. It has only now
appeared in English in a translation by Philip Ó Ceallaigh, and it couldn’t be
more timely. Then, as today, while the perpetrators get most of the attention,
silent bystanders also get their due:
“If somebody set themselves up in the middle of the street
to demand, let’s say, ‘Death to badgers,’ I think that would suffice to arouse
some surprise among those passing by. Now that I think about it, the problem
isn’t that three boys can stand at a street corner and cry ‘Death to the Yids.’
But that the cry goes unobserved and unopposed, like the tinkling of a bell on
a tram.”
The Nazis haven’t arrived in Romania yet, but anti-Semitism
is on the march. Jewish students are attacked and beaten for having the
temerity to attend their classes. Professors at best stand quietly by; at times
they encourage the perpetrators. Each night the narrator returns to a dormitory
where the victims compare wounds and try to imagine the future.
The novel follows this insightful young student into
adulthood. The narrator changes his major to architecture, at the encouragement
of a nationalist professor he idolizes. He becomes an architect and is hired by
an eccentric American tycoon named Ralph Rice. He lives in Paris for a time,
and eventually returns to Romania to work on Rice’s oil fields. The drilling
kills the local plum trees, which are the heart of the peasant economy and
culture. An entire village is moved to make way for oil production. Then the
narrator takes on the design and building of a house for the professor he once
loved, whose classes he used to be thrown out of by the professor’s young
acolytes.
All this drama, though, is backdrop to the narrator’s deeper
struggle not just to survive but to understand, and this is the beating heart
of the novel that echoes through to today. As he moves through life, he meets
with many anti-Semites. He attends their classes. He breaks bread with them,
works side-by-side with them. He talks to other Jews with differing responses
to the rising crisis. Most of the people he talks with – nationalists,
anti-Semites, communists, Zionists, and oblivious foreigners – are types
intended to represent a particular point of view. And yet, his conversations
with them are fresh and engaging, as are his later reflection on them:
“Don’t allow yourself to indulge your suffering. There’s a
great voluptuousness in persecution and feeling yourself wronged is probably
one of the proudest of private pleasures…. Think how ridiculous we would be if
we were alarmed at every shower of rain that soaked us.”
Mihail Sebastian is the pen name of Iosif Hechter,
and this novel is thinly disguised autobiography. The other major work he is
known for is the journal he kept from 1935 to 1944. When it was finally
published in 1996, it was quickly recognized as an important chronicle of the
rise of nazism in Europe. Sebastian’s humanistic observations of the
catastrophe as it unfolded can help us understand his time and ours. Having
survived the Holocaust, Sebastian was hit by a truck and killed while crossing
a Bucharest street in 1945, on his way to give a lecture on Balzac. He was 37
years old. As the prescient young narrator says early in this book, making a
failing of Sebastian’s great strength as a chronicler,
“Something tells me that we are unable to live any of life’s
moments fully. Not one of them. That we eternally stand at a remove from what
is happening. A little above or a little below things, but never at their
heart… That the fires we lit to offer up our hearts smouldered out too soon.”
###
Bronwyn Mauldin writes fiction and poetry, and creates
zines. She will be an Artist in Residence at Denali National Park and Preserve
in summer 2018. More at bronwynmauldin.com.
On "Being Indie" is a blog series that introduces us to a wide variety of small press authors and publishers as they discuss what being indie means to them.
Today, we're featuring K.M. Ecke as part of the Moral Panic blog tour, hosted by RogerCharlie.
K.M. Ecke is an organic, free-range, preservative-free,
philosopher-poet using universal truth to battle cultural insanity. Ecke chose
to pursue writing, soul-searching and creative projects. After several years of
odd jobs learning about different pieces of the world, he began his own private
music teaching business and attended Colorado Film School for a year and a half
to study filmmaking. After 18-months in his program, he veered to his own path
and established Dream Flow Media, the home to all of his creative endeavors;
publishing, music and all additional branches of the many-faceted visionary.
Along with his own creations, he strives to bring other artists into the fold
to develop a creative collective for a variety of multimedia projects.
Ecke also works as a filmmaker for local non-profits and
bands, and hopes one day to see Moral Panic on the big screen. The
author lives in Denver, Colorado and hosts a storytelling micro-podcast Myths,
Metaphors, and Morality. For more info, visit the author online at
TheDreamFlow.com.
My first reason for being in the independent publishing world is
sovereignty.
Whenever possible, I want control over my own destiny. I want to
experience my own successes and failures.
The publishing world is changing so rapidly that the big five
publishers can’t adapt as quickly as a smaller player.
I’d rather set sail in the storm and learn from the crashing
waves than board the Titanic knowing I’m not getting a lifeboat. At least
there’s honor in facing the rolling tide.
The second reason is pragmatism. I honestly think it’s a better
idea in the current market conditions.
If I went with the old system, I’d have to send my manuscripts to
dozens of agents receiving hundreds of novels every week, wait months to hear
back from them (if I heard back at all), and then best-case scenario I’d get
signed to a publishing deal (probably without an advance, because unless you’re
already well-known with a big following they won’t give you one) where they
take the majority of the revenue from my work, and completely control the
amount of resources they use to promote the book.
I’ve heard horror stories about authors who get signed to a
publishing deal and then don’t get any support after the first sign that the
novel won’t be a New York Times bestseller. Even if I were signed to a big
publishing company, let’s be honest, if they’re deciding where a better return
on their investment is going to come from they’re not going to pick my book,
they’ll get far more money using their resources on the next Dan Brown or Neil
Gaiman book than mine.
By the time I got all of that going and started making anywhere
near enough money to live, I probably could have written another novel.
I don’t want to stall and anxiously wait around for someone else
to tell me when I’m allowed into the art form. I’d rather publish and move on
to the next story, learning along the way, because then I know I’m growing on
several different levels. Prolificity is more important to me than perfection.
I believe the story of my novel, Moral Panic, needs to be told, and the only guaranteed way to do
that is to take on all the boring publishing business stuff I don’t want to do
as the burden of responsibility for living the life I want to live. I won’t
have the brass ring of being a “published author” but my book is mine to shape,
refine, or rework until the day I die.
My third reason has to do with fulfillment. Not just happiness,
fulfillment.
I became self-employed three and a half years ago and that
experience has afforded me the time to explore what I’ve wanted to explore.
I’ve left jobs where I would have made more money to go after the
self-development and potential of making either the same amount (or more) money
in the long-term doing what actually interests me.
They say time is money . . . and they’re wrong.
Time is more valuable than money. Money is something humans
create that we attribute arbitrary value to. Time is something we experience.
You can recover lost money. You can’t recover lost time. I’m still relatively
young. This is the time to take risks.
When I was in college I thought about becoming a lawyer. It was
safe and I would have been good at it, but why be a mediocre lawyer? Why be a
mediocre anything? Mediocrity comes from the lack of courage to be what you
are.
