Tuesday, April 30, 2013

The Indie Ink Runs Deep: Pat Pujolas




I've been tossing around the idea of blogging a tattoo series for nearly a year now. I know there are websites and books out there that have been-there-done-that already, but I hadn't seen one with a specific focus on the authors and publishers of the small press community. 

After hoarding the photos and essays I've been collecting from these guys since July of 2012, and with the promise of spring peeking its deliciously sunny head out through all of this winter gloom, I decided there was no better time than now to finally unveil THE INDIE INK RUNS DEEP mini-series!


Today's indie ink is from Pat PujloasPat is the author of “Jimmy Lagowski Saves the World” (Independent Talent Group, 2012) and frequent contributor to ManArchy magazine. He lives in Akron, Ohio, as well as on Goodreads.




I have three tattoos; this one is the smallest but the most meaningful; it was also the most painful. There are more sensitive areas on the body (genitals, feet, eyeballs), but the inside of the wrist is a pretty good place to gauge human sensitivity (and no doubt why new mothers test warm milk here). It seems fitting, because this tattoo represents my commitment to being a writer. As any artist will tell you, there is a constant, almost daily struggle between occupation (making a living) and passion (practicing your craft). In July of 2001, with three unpublished books and enough rejection slips to wallpaper most of Seattle, I found myself ready to give up on my passion and focus on occupation. And so I had this star affixed to my wrist, as a daily reminder to keep writing. Because if I ever do give up, I will have to stare at this damn thing every day and wonder, “What might’ve happened if I had just kept going, kept writing, one more word, one more sentence, one more story?” And that is the sort of pain I refuse to endure. 

Monday, April 29, 2013

The Audio Series: Donald O'Donovan



Our new audio series "The Authors Read. We Listen." is an incredibly special one for us. Hatched in a NYC club during BEA week, this feature requires more work of the author than any of the ones that have come before. And that makes it all the more sweeter when you see, or rather, hear them read excerpts from their own novels, in their own voices, the way their stories were meant to be heard.


Today, we are treated to an excerpt of Night Train,  read by author Donald O'Donovan. O'Donovan, author of the picaresque autobiographical novels Night Train, Highway and Tarantula Woman, was born in Cooperstown, New York. A teenage runaway, he rode freights and hitchhiked across America, served in the US Army with the 82nd Airborne Division, lived in Mexico, and worked at more than 200 occupations including long distance truck driver, undertaker and roller skate repairman. His newest novel, Orgasmo, will be published in June 2013, along with a collection, Twenty Thousand Years in Disneyland. Donald O’Donovan lives mostly in Los Angeles.






Click the soundcloud link below to experience Donald O'Donovan reading from Night Train. 






The word on Night Train:

Fast, furious, unforgettable and set against the backdrop of a crumbling civilization, NIGHT TRAIN follows arch-outsider Jerzy Mulvaney in an audacious account of what it means to be homeless on the streets of Los Angeles.
*lifted from goodreads with love

Wednesday, April 24, 2013

Where Writers Write: William Luvaas


Welcome to another installment of TNBBC's Where Writers Write!

Where Writers Write is a weekly series that will feature a different author every Wednesday as they 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 William LuvaasWilliam has published two novels, The Seductions of Natalie Bach (Little, Brown and Going Under (Putnam)--reissued as ebooks by Foreverland Press–and two story collections, A Working Man’s Apocrypha (Univ. Okla. Press) and Ashes Rain Down: A Story Cycle (Spuyten Duyvil).  His essays, articles and over 50 short stories have appeared in many publications, including The American Fiction Anthology, Antioch Review, Confrontation, Epiphany, Glimmer Train, Grain, North American Review, The Sun, Thema, The Village Voice and The Washington Post Book World.  He has received fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts, the Ludwig Vogelstein and Edward Albee foundations, and has won Glimmer Train’s Fiction Open Contest, The Ledge Magazine’s Fiction Competition, and Fiction Network’s 2nd National Fiction Competition.  He has taught creative writing at San Diego State University, U.C.-Riverside and The Writer’s Voice in New York and is online fiction editor for Cutthroat: A Journal of the Arts.  He lives in Riverside County, CA with his wife Lucinda, a painter and film maker.




Where William Luvaas Writes



Where we write at once raises another question: how we write.  What are our writing habits and idiosyncracies, one could say “necessities”?   I believe it was E.M. Forster who couldn’t get to the desk until he saw a car with a certain combination of letters and numbers on its license plate pass by his flat.  Toni Morrison is said to light candles before taking up the pen.  I have a California  friend who can only write in Mexican cafes.  I myself must take a cup of coffee to the desk with me, morning or night, my writerly addiction.  If we ever have a coffee drought I am finished.  Are these just silly talismans or do they help us establish a comfort zone?

My studies are always cluttered places: books, files, computers, magazines, notes, wall charts, a manuscript closet stacked floor to ceiling with drafts (and too many unpublished novel manuscripts).  My desk is a chunky, hand-made six foot slab fashioned of an antique door covered by a sheet of shellacked particle board.  I favor windows looking out on nature, reminding me that I am part of a bigger whole.  From my current study I can see the San Jacinto Mountains through lacy foliage.  I once built a study in the attic of a house in the Adirondacks and cut a window to look out over farmlands below and hills opposite, opulently green in summer, snow covered mid-winter (20 below zero outside).  I was always cold and felt intimidated sitting on top of the world in my icy aerie, but got lots of work done.  Only while living in Brooklyn did I turn my desk from the window to stare dumbly at a wall.  (Though walls can be useful; Faulkner wrote notes for A Fable on a wall of his study at Rowan Oak.)


I don’t write well outside of my sanctum.  The desk is too small, the light isn’t right, I don’t have a scrap of paper I scribbled a note on and I am lost without it.  The smell is wrong.  The strange bare room doesn’t speak to me–or speaks in a stranger’s voice, while my own whispers away through the floorboards.  Public spaces are out of the question.  Solzhenitsyn requires “peace and space” to write, and I suppose I do, too.  My study is my adytum, my small, isolated, wholly individuated space away from the world which helps me find the perspective and confidence to write about that world.

Tuesday, April 23, 2013

The Indie Ink Runs Deep: Katherine Scott Nelson



I've been tossing around the idea of blogging a tattoo series for nearly a year now. I know there are websites and books out there that have been-there-done-that already, but I hadn't seen one with a specific focus on the authors and publishers of the small press community. 

After hoarding the photos and essays I've been collecting from these guys since July of 2012, and with the promise of spring peeking its deliciously sunny head out through all of this winter gloom, I decided there was no better time than now to finally unveil THE INDIE INK RUNS DEEP mini-series!


Today's indie ink is from Katherine Scott Nelson.  Katherine Scott is the author of the Lambda-nominated novella Have You Seen Me, published by the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography. Hir work has also appeared in Fiction at Work and Confrontation. Ze is bowing to peer pressure and writing about hir gender.




The words came first: SEI ALLEM ABSCHIED VORAN. Let me warn you right now, if you are going to get a phrase in a foreign language tattooed on you, you had better have an easy-to-grasp translation handy. I spent six months trying to explain to strangers in bars and parks and grocery stores just what "Be ahead of all parting" means, who Rainer Maria Rilke was, and what it had meant to have someone tell me to be a ringing glass that shatters as it rings. I started whipping out my phone and looking up a translation of Sonnets to Orpheus 2.13 to hand to curious people, because it was often faster. Now I just tell people that it means "Quit your job and be a writer."


A year and a half later, my first book, Have You Seen Me, was getting published. I'd kept the faith and done the work, and it was finally paying off. Since this was only going to happen once in my life - this momentous movement from "unpublished writer" to "published writer" - I decided to add to the tattoo to remind myself that I had done it.

I took the idea of a quarter-sleeve focused around a burning antique typewriter to Jason Vaughn at Deluxe Tattoo in Chicago, who does incredible things with color and line and composition, and who I could not recommend more highly. Did it hurt? C'mon. I sweated way more blood writing the book.

I love this tattoo. I plan to add to it every time I have some major success as a writer, so that when I'm 80, my left arm will be covered in a full sleeve of authorial bad-assitude.

However, there has been one unintended consequence to getting this tattoo: people have started giving me antique typewriter parts as gifts. My dad even snagged me a real Underwood at the Tempe Swap Meet.
He thinks it still works. He thinks I'm going to disassemble this oily mess in my 300-square-foot apartment to find out.


The Audio Series: Michelle Muckley


Our new audio series "The Authors Read. We Listen." is an incredibly special one for us. Hatched in a NYC club during BEA week, this feature requires more work of the author than any of the ones that have come before. And that makes it all the more sweeter when you see, or rather, hear them read excerpts from their own novels, in their own voices, the way their stories were meant to be heard.


Today, we are treated to an excerpt of Escaping Life, read by author Michelle Muckley. She decided that she was going to be a writer from a young age.  Apparently, she also decided to be a procrastinator, and waited twenty years before she finally wrote Chapter One.  In the meantime she studied science and started working in cardiology.  she loved this job, but there was a creative need that remained unfulfilled.   It was at this point that she began to write her first book.

Six years later, having uprooted from England and having settled on the southern Mediterranean shores of Cyprus, the dream to publish is now a reality. She is still working as a part time scientist, but is also writing daily. When she is not sat at the computer you will find her hiking in the mountains, drinking frappe at the beach, or talking to herself in the kitchen in the style of an American celebrity chef.  Just think Ina Garten.  





Click the soundcloud link below to experience Michelle Muckley reading from Escaping Life. 




The word on Escaping Life:

It’s beautiful here. It’s a beautiful place to die.

Since the accident claimed her sister’s life, Haven has been a sanctuary for Elizabeth Green.She has finally found some of the tranquility that she thought had been lost long ago to the past.Homicide cop Jack Fraser is running away from his miserable life too.But when the discovery of a body on a local beach leads him directly to Elizabeth’s front door, it seems her past might not have been left behind her after all. Together they must face their demons, and in the process expose the dangerous secrets that cloud their lives before it’s too late.

Running from reality is sometimes more painful than discovering the truth.

Wednesday, April 17, 2013

Where Writers Write: Sofia Samatar


Welcome to another installment of TNBBC's Where Writers Write!

Where Writers Write is a weekly series that will feature a different author every Wednesday as they 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. 



Photo by Adauto Araujo

This is Sofia Samatar

Sofia is the author of the novel A Stranger in Olondria (Small Beer Press, April 2013). She wrote the first draft of the novel in South Sudan, but she did a lot of revision and rewriting in Madison, Wisconsin, where she lives and writes now. 

She is Nonfiction and Poetry Editor for Interfictions: A Journal of Interstitial Arts, and blogs at sofiasamatar.blogspot.com.





Where Sofia Samatar Writes


There’s day writing, and there’s night writing.

During the day, I often write at Café Zoma, around the block from my apartment.

I’m always there on weekend afternoons. I like the feeling of being with people and alone at the same time, and I like the soup. Here’s my favorite table:


I write in cafés because I read Ernest Hemingway in high school and never got over it. I will always believe that it is dashing and romantic to write in cafés, even though, unlike Hemingway, I live in a well-heated apartment. You know in A Moveable Feast when he’s writing and drinking rum and café au lait, and that girl comes in with a face like a newly-minted coin, and he finishes the story and orders oysters and white wine and thinks he’s written something really good? This is basically my ideal of the writing life, and it’s what I have at Café Zoma, minus the booze and the oysters and creeping on some girl and Hadley at home alone in the cold apartment wearing all her sweaters.

At night, I write on this chair:


I curl up to write. I can curl up with my laptop, which is very small. It’s terrible for my back. I have to figure out something else.

The mess all over the floor is because you never know what you’re going to need. It’s best to keep everything where you can reach it.



Next week, check back to see where Bill Luvaas puts the pen to the paper.

Tuesday, April 16, 2013

The Indie Ink Runs Deep: Vanessa Veselka




I've been tossing around the idea of blogging a tattoo series for nearly a year now. I know there are websites and books out there that have been-there-done-that already, but I hadn't seen one with a specific focus on the authors and publishers of the small press community. 

After hoarding the photos and essays I've been collecting from these guys since July of 2012, and with the promise of spring peeking its deliciously sunny head out through all of this winter gloom, I decided there was no better time than now to finally unveil THE INDIE INK RUNS DEEP mini-series!



Today's indie ink is from Vanessa Veselka. Vanessa has been at various times a teenage runaway, a sex-worker, a union organizer, a student of paleontology, and a mother. Her work appears in The Atlantic, Tin House, The FSG anthology Bitch: Feminist Response to Pop Culture, and Maximum Rock ’n’ Roll with work forthcoming in GQ and Zyzzva. Her debut novel, Zazen, is a 2011 finalist for the Ken Kesey Prize in fiction.



My lion tattoo is of Fortitude, one of the New York Public Library lions. The number below it is my library of congress catalog number. When I got the tattoo, I’d just spent a few awful months in an MFA program where the pressure to hide your victories and celebrate your fear was everywhere—the whole thing was like a misery factory with a golden apple on top. It shook me up pretty badly until I remembered that I didn’t need a secret handshake from anyone and quit the program. Later that week, I got the library of congress catalog number for Zazen, which was about to debut. I was already going to get a tattoo in honor of my first novel, but it was going to be small and cryptic so that no one would know what it meant. After my MFA experience I decided to get a big-ass lion on my arm as a reminder that art isn’t improved by shame or insecurity. Moreover, pride is essential. It’s what makes you go after more than you can actually get, which is the only game in town. Shoot me, I thought. I published a novel. Shoot me. I’m proud to be in the library. In fact, it’s a goddamned honor.

And thus the lion was inked.

Monday, April 15, 2013

The Audio Series: Matthew Salesses



Our new audio series "The Authors Read. We Listen." is an incredibly special one for us. Hatched in a NYC club during BEA week, this feature requires more work of the author than any of the ones that have come before. And that makes it all the more sweeter when you see, or rather, hear them read excerpts from their own novels, in their own voices, the way their stories were meant to be heard.


Today, we're treated to an excerpt of I'm Not Saying, I'm Just Saying, read by author Matthew Salesses. He also wrote The Last Repatriate , and two chapbooks,Our Island of Epidemics and We Will Take What We Can Get . He was adopted from Korea at age two, returned to Korea, and married a Korean woman. He writes a column about his wife and baby for The Good Men Project. His other essays and fiction appear in The New York Times Motherlode blog, Glimmer Train, The Rumpus, Hyphen, Koream, Witness, American Short Fiction, and others. He has received awards from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, PANK, Glimmer Train, Mid-American Review, HTMLGIANT, The University of New Orleans, and IMPAC. He did his MFA at Emerson College (2009), where he was the Presidential Fellow and editedRedivider, and now serves as Fiction Editor for the Good Men Project.






Click the soundcloud link below to experience I'm Not Saying, I'm Just Saying as read by the author:





The word on I'm Not Saying, I'm Just Saying:

I'm Not Saying, I'm Just Saying, a novel in flash fiction, is a raw, honest look at parenting, commitment, morality, and the spaces that grow between and within us when we don't know what to say. In these 115 titled chapters, a man, who learns he has a 5-year-old son, is caught between the life he knows and a life he may not yet be ready for. This is a book that tears down the boundaries in relationships, sentences, origin and identity, no matter how quickly its narrator tries to build them up.
*lifted from goodreads with love

Friday, April 12, 2013

Christoph Paul's Guide to Books & Booze



Time to grab a book and get tipsy!

Books & Booze is a new mini-series of sorts here on TNBBC that will post every Friday in October. The participating authors were challenged 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. 



Boozey, Baby....

If The Passion of the Christoph was to reflect an alcoholic beverage it would be a special Central Floridian drink called a 'Moonacolada', basically, you use moonshine instead of rum in a fruity drink that will leave wondering what the fuck is going on. 

With all the porn store stories (I managed one in DC for two years), the satire pieces involving Book Tips from the Ol' Dirty Bastard, and non-fiction about military school crazies and the french girl I met who really really liked birds. 

Only a Moonacolada could leave you with an experience like reading The Passion of the Christoph. 





Christoph Paul is a former porn store manager and singer/guitarist of the rock band The Only Prescription. He graduated from the Wilkes University with an MA in Creative Writing. 

"The Passion of the Christoph" is his first book of non-fiction and satire being released April 1st 2013 with Swift Ink Books. He is now working on a YA book called "Joey 'The Art Film' Caldo" and a collection of poetry with the working title "Buy This Poetry Book So I Can Afford Therapy."

Wednesday, April 10, 2013

Where Writers Write: BJ Best


Welcome to another installment of TNBBC's Where Writers Write!

Where Writers Write is a weekly series that will feature a different author every Wednesday as they 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 BJ Best

He is the author of three books of poetry: Birds of Wisconsin (New Rivers Press), State Sonnets (sunnyoutside), and most recently the video game-inspired prose poem collection But Our Princess Is in Another Castle from Rose Metal Press. He teaches at Carroll University and lives in the Wisconsin countryside with his wife and son in the house in which he grew up.







Where BJ Best Writes



Several years ago, I fell in love with typewriters.  I’ve written a whole essay about my quest to collect them, available online (link: http://site.xavier.edu/polt/typewriters/best.html).  About seven years ago, my wife and I repainted and recarpeted a spare bedroom in our century-old home for use as my office; we bought some shelves, I displayed my collection, and it has hence become formally known to my family (including my two-year-old son Henry) as the Typewriter Room.

I used to love pounding on keys, fiddling with ribbons, and x’ing out wrong words—it was so counterculturally anachronistic.  I’ve written with typewriters in dining rooms and bars; on decks, picnic tables, and boats; in my office at school and in the middle of a river.  The very first poems of my recent book were written on typewriters.

And then I stopped.  It began to feel like I was prizing style over substance, attention to the act of writing rather than to the words written.



But still I had a room full of typewriters, and had slowly begun to accumulate flotsam that would mark me as twee, pretentious, and hipsteresque.  Antique cameras.  A vintage microscope.  A menagerie of Mold-A-Rama figurines from the Milwaukee County Zoo.  A transistor radio from the sixties, a silver dollar from 1881, a fossilized fish from the Middle Eocene.

There’s still a part of me that wakes up every morning a bit amazed I’m a poet with several books and that I teach college English for a living.  My undergraduate majors were actuarial science and finance.  I suppose I’ve outfitted the Typewriter Room like the scene of a play:  this is what I imagine a writer’s studio looks like, so I guess writing should occur here.  Henry’s favorite typewriter to bang upon is a Oliver #9 from 1916, but he prefers racing Hot Wheels, which began as ironic showpieces from my childhood and are now his bona fide toys.



We learn what matters, again and again.  Now I write first drafts longhand in a journal, and tap them into a laptop thereafter.  My actual view while writing is more or less a blank wall.  I’ve given my various talismans their power, their position, and their say.  Thus established, I can move past them and get to the real subject, to the unglamorously fundamental pen and page.

I write in a museum, ultimately, so I can ignore it.


Check back next week when Sofia Samatar shows off her writing space. 

Tuesday, April 9, 2013

The Indie Ink Runs Deep: Jason Pettus




I've been tossing around the idea of blogging a tattoo series for nearly a year now. I know there are websites and books out there that have been-there-done-that already, but I hadn't seen one with a specific focus on the authors and publishers of the small press community. 

After hoarding the photos and essays I've been collecting from these guys since July of 2012, and with the promise of spring peeking its deliciously sunny head out through all of this winter gloom, I decided there was no better time than now to finally unveil THE INDIE INK RUNS DEEP mini-series!


Today's Indie Ink is from my new boss, Jason Pettus, owner of CCLaP:




Back when I was an undergraduate, I decided to celebrate my 21st birthday with a rite of passage, by doing something I had always wanted to do but had always been afraid of; the original plan was to get my first tattoo, but I ultimately chickened out and got my ear pierced instead (which turned out to be pretty terrifying indeed, in that my starter stud got stuck in the gun that shot it through my ear, and they had to twist and turn it to no end of intense pain). Ten years later, I decided to finally make a go of it with a tattoo; it was the late '90s and I was living in Chicago by then, and was a writer myself at the time so decided to get a copyright symbol inked on my shoulder, done by someone who was a fellow participant in what at the time was Chicago's large poetry-slam community. It took about an hour and was one of the most traumatic experiences of my life, which is what has kept me from getting any others besides this.


Saturday, April 6, 2013

Indie Spotlight: Ilan Mochari



Almost every author has two jobs: Writing the book, and finding the employment that allows time to write that book.

In today’s spotlight, Ilan Mochari, whose debut novel, Zinsky the Obscure (Fomite Press), has earned high acclaim from Booklist and Kirkus Reviews, talks about his nine years as a waiter in the Greater Boston area.







There’s a One-Letter Difference Between Waiter and Writer

I know, I know. It’s not the deepest etymological observation.

But when you spend nine years as a waiter -- and it’s during those years that you write your first novel -- well, the similarity between the words doesn’t lose its charm.

And here’s the thing: I never wanted to be a waiter. In 2003, when this adventure began, I hated staying up late; I was indifferent to recipes and mixology; and I was exceptionally unkempt. Previous employers had critiqued my appearance in annual performance reviews.

So why did I do it? Mainly because of my admiration for a woman named Sarah Casalan. We had grown very close, speaking almost every night on the phone. She was under 30 and already a project-management rockstar, on track to be a C-level exec in the near future. And I? I was 28, unemployed, and drowning in red ink. My debt had reached $20,000 and I still spent exorbitantly on trips to Vegas and God knows what else. (When your late-twenties brain is still filled with teenage levels of passive suicidal ideation, that’s how you roll.)

I told Sarah that what I wanted -- more than anything -- was to write a great novel. But how could I find the time to do it, while working enough to climb out of debt? She suggested waiting tables. It was, she argued, the best way to be “all in” about writing a book, while staying fiscally responsible. You made good money, yet it was the type of job that you didn’t take home. Leaving aside the memorization of menus, your downtime was yours, rather than your manager’s.

I savored the suggestion, for the geekiest of reasons. The narrator of one my favorite novels, I Served the King of England by Bohumil Hrabal, was a waiter. “Try putting that on a job application,” Sarah joked.

I was terrible at the beginning. I dripped drinks, I dropped dishes, I mangled orders. And I struggled to primp properly. There were wrinkles in my clothes and flakes of dandruff in my dark-brown hair. But after a few false starts -- where my employers, with plenty of justification, lost patience with me -- I settled in at the Full Moon Restaurant. The owners took a chance, despite the warts on my profile. I had no idea, when I began working there in October of 2003, that I would stay until February 2012. But that’s exactly what happened. And it was one of the best things to ever happen to my writing life.

For one thing, I got to work with other creatives. Musicians and glass artists, painters and filmmakers. All of us were waiting tables for the same reason. Our interactions were fruitful and empathetic, absent the petty jealousies that sometimes arise when you’re talking shop with genre bedfellows.

For another, my Spanish improved dramatically. That will happen, when most kitchen employees hail from Central America. At one point I was reading voraciously about El Salvador’s history. I composed three stories in what I (then) conceived would be a collection of Salvadoran tales.

On top of all this, I built something of a fan base from my regular customers. One of them -- the playwright Lydia Diamond -- ended up giving my novel a blurb.

But more than anything -- corny as it sounds -- I learned how to persevere as a writer. Two examples:

•   The Sunday of Despair. I wrote my entire first draft by hand in coffee shops in 2003 and early 2004. By the summer of 2004 I had completed a second draft by typing it up (and editing as I went) on my computer. Then -- one Sunday morning in 2004 -- my PC died. I worked an entire brunch shift almost certain I’d lost my book. Fortunately, the PC hadn’t died. It had just lost the ability to run Windows. So with a few tricks of the MS-DOS trade, I was able to copy the Word file onto a disk and save it. But let me tell you -- that was one bleak Sunday.

•   The Years of Rejections. One of my favorite moments in The World According to Garp is when young T.S. Garp realizes, while living with his mother in Vienna, that he has what it takes to be a writer. He just knows he can write a better story than the famous (fictional) Australian writer Franz Grillparzer. My own Grillparzers were too many to mention. Getting published? How hard could it be, in a world full of Grillparzers? How wrong I was. I began seeking agents in 2007. I still don’t have one. And I didn’t find my publisher until 2011. By which time I realized how fortunate I was to find one. And how lucky I was that it only took four years.

All this is why I’ll always be grateful to Sarah. At a time when I was struggling, she gave me some killer advice. And now, nearly 10 years after I wrote its first sentence, my novel is coming out. I am holding my head a little higher. My ideation is almost gone. And I am paying more attention to how I dress.



Bio:

Ilan Mochari’s debut novel, Zinsky the Obscure (Fomite Press), is now available on Amazon. His short stories have appeared in Keyhole, Stymie, Ruthie's Club, and Oysters & Chocolate. He has a B.A. in English from Yale University. He used it to wait tables for nine years in the Boston area.

Thursday, April 4, 2013

Larry Closs: A First Time Author's First Year



Back in December 2011, I received an email from Larry Closs, a first time author, requesting a review for his upcoming release Beatitude. The well written, personalized pitch and the interesting premise of the book caught my attention. Having fallen in love with his writing and his characters, I offered to host a blog tour for Larry's book, fearful that his newness to the literary world and the smallness of his super-small press might cause it to go generally unnoticed.

To kick off the tour, I asked Larry to discuss what being an indie author meant to him. You can read his essay on the topic here. Today, a little over a year after the book's release, Larry is back on TNBBC with a guest post, sharing his thoughts and gratitude...



Gratitude for Beatitude

A first-time author’s first year


Stopping by New York’s landmark independent bookshop The Strand recently, I headed to a specific stretch of the store’s “18 miles of books”—a few inches on a shelf in the fiction section. As I made my way down a 15-foot canyon created by towering black shelves on either side, I scanned the last names of the authors on the spines of books I passed, advancing in reverse alphabetical order until I arrived at the letter C. Holding my breath for just a moment as I zeroed in, I happily exhaled when I saw not one but four copies of my debut novel, Beatitude.

And there you have it, one of the minor yet sublimely soul-satisfying moments in the life of a first-time author—seeing your book in a bookstore. It’s a moment that comes after a myriad others that punctuate the countdown to publication. You write a book. Intrigue an agent. Land a publisher. Negotiate a contract. Finesse the manuscript. Caress the galley. Bless the cover. Brace for the Big Day. And though you’ve daydreamed for a full year or longer about what happens next, how your life will be irrevocably altered when your words finally enter the world, you never could have predicted what actually happens, where your book will take you.

That’s what I found, anyway. Being an author has indeed altered my life irrevocably, not in the big ways I might have imagined, but in small ways that are no less significant. Beatitude has brought an ever-increasing collection of insights, encounters and connections accentuated by a series of firsts that continue to unfold. Here is what happened.

1. The first time I held Beatitude in my hands. It’s hard to believe, but supply-chain idiosyncrasies provided Amazon with copies of Beatitude a week before my publisher, Rebel Satori Press. Frustrated at seeing my book for sale online, and by the idea that warehouse workers could hold it but I couldn’t, I finally caved and ordered two copies, not only paying full price for the books but splurging on overnight shipping. I held the package for a minute before ripping it open, and I sat with the book in my lap for a lot longer, staring at the cover and reflecting on the long and winding road that had brought me to that moment. It’s often said that the journey is the destination, and Beatitude had taken me on quite a journey, but there’s a lot to be said for finally reaching the destination.

                        2. The first email from a reader. Shortly after Beatitude was published, I received an email from a reader, someone I didn’t know, who wrote to tell me how much he’d connected with the story of Harry and Jay, two young men who bond over their shared fascination with Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and the Beat Generation and struggle with the sometimes thin line between friendship and love. “The message Harry reiterated, that sometimes people are only capable of giving a certain amount of love and that doesn’t mean they love you any less than you love them, rang very true. A lot of the scenes I felt like I lived through but never could have put into such lucid words. Thanks for doing that.” No, Mark, thank you. Few words have ever meant more to me.

3. The first reading. In a coincidence I discovered at the last moment, the date I selected at random from a list of possibilities provided by Barnes & Noble Community Relations Manager Lou Pizzitola was Jack Kerouac’s 90th birthday, March 12, 2012. For a reading from a novel inspired by the Beat Generation, I couldn’t have picked a more appropriate date if I’d tried—even more so, given that one of the themes Beatitude examines is whether there’s such a thing as coincidence. The best part of the reading, besides seeing a lot of friends in the crowd? Seeing a lot of strangers.

4. How much of the book is true? This is the most frequently asked question I get. Because Beatitude is a first novel and written in the first person, many assume that everything described in the book actually happened in real life. My answer? It’s all true. Including the talking cat.

5. Read me, maybe. People I never expected to read Beatitude did; people I felt sure would read it didn’t. What can you do? I’ve never asked anyone to read Beatitude. I figure if they want to, they will. And though I love hearing reactions to the book, I never ask anyone who has read it for their thoughts. Again, I figure if they want to share them, they will. On a related note, I discovered that anyone who knows me might not know what to say after they’ve read it, especially if they believe that every word is true (see No. 4).

6. Giving thanks. The last thing I wrote before Beatitude went to press was the Acknowledgements, and I was elated to finally, formally, thank everyone who had helped me along the way. Some were surprised to see themselves there, thanked for something they said or did—sometimes long forgotten—over the 10 years it took me to write the book. They never realized they had inspired me to keep going, keep believing, when it was hard to believe I would ever finish. I can never thank them enough.

7. Readers’ favorite lines and passages. I have my favorite lines and passages as, I imagine, every author does. Some were surprisingly effortless, but most were the result of many hours laboring to perfect the rhythm and cadence, sometimes for a single sentence. So it is fascinating to hear which lines resonated with others. From Jennifer: “It arrives when you least expect it, in ways you never imagine, from a place you never thought it could come, in a form you never thought it could take…” From Ben: “It was only a matter of time, I told myself, before everything fell into place. It was only a matter of time, however, before everything fell apart.” From Chris: “We’re sharing experiences right now. You only have to be in the moment to realize it.” From Patrick: “To be Beat was to be in love with life, to exist in a state of beatitude, to exist in a state of unconditional bliss.”

8. The first review. And every other review. There’s nothing more rewarding than an insightful book review that uncovers layers of meaning never consciously intended but, now that you mention it, there they are. I’m fortunate to have had many perceptive reviews of Beatitude in mainstream media, literary magazines, industry trades and book blogs, as well as equally discerning reviews on Goodreads.com, Amazon and Barnes & Noble. I’ve read every one, never tire of them and try to personally thank everyone who took the time to read my words and offer their considered opinions. I love learning what my book is about.

9. Is Beatitude a gay novel—or not? This question came up almost immediately and took me by surprise. The backstory: Though my publisher, Rebel Satori Press, has an imprint for works of interest to the LGBT community, QueerMojo, founder Sven Davisson felt Beatitude belonged under the Rebel Satori imprint, which focuses on inspirational books exploring “revolutionary personal transformation.” One of the very first reviewers tagged Beatitude as “gay literature,” adding that the author would no doubt “cringe to have it described as such.” I did cringe, but only at the suggestion that I would, and only until the next reviewer, on an LGBT literary site, praised Beatitude but concluded that she “would probably not label this novel as ‘gay’ if asked.” So which is it? And does it matter? An interviewer asked me my thoughts. Here’s what I told her:

I didn’t set out to write a “gay novel.” I’m not even sure what makes a novel “gay.” A gay writer? A gay narrator? Two gay characters? Three gay characters? What’s the tipping point? How many gay characters does it take to screw in a…? Is a gay novel about an experience that only an LGBT person can have? Putting prejudice, bigotry and religious nonsense aside, what experience would that be? When Brokeback Mountain came out, Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal were constantly asked what it felt like to kiss another guy. Ledger was so exasperated by the question that he finally snapped: “It’s kissing a human being. So fucking what!” The point is: Remove gender, sexuality, race, class and nationality from the equation and human experience is universal. I read and relate to plenty of “straight” novels but I’ve never thought of them as such. No one does. They’re just novels.

Are novels gay by virtue of who writes them or who reads them? It’s like a Zen koan, a riddle. Two monks observe a flag flapping in the wind. “The flag is moving,” says one. “The wind is moving,” counters the other. Their master overhears them and says, “Not the flag, not the wind; mind is moving.” To me, Beatitude is a novel. Like it says right on the cover. But I know that readers will view it through their own preconceptions, which is entirely appropriate, because how preconceptions affect the ability to view things accurately is one of the themes Beatitude explores.

One of my favorite reviews, by Tara Olmsted of BookSexy, sums it up best: “And that’s the heart of Beatitude: the reminder that love is love, regardless of whether it’s romantic or platonic. Larry Closs weaves together a beautiful and complicated narrative around this idea. He’s created a novel that shouldn’t be pigeonholed as any one thing: as a love story, LGBT lit, a memorial to the Beats, a book about NYC. Because it’s all those things and more. There are multiple layers to the story Closs has given us, and it’d be a mistake to allow ourselves to get caught up in just one.”

10. Best LGBT Fiction of 2012. Beatitude won a Gold IPPY in the Independent Publisher Book Awards for Best LGBT Fiction of 2012. So, that settles No. 9, right? Not exactly. Seems the Best LGBT Novel of 2012 wasn’t even nominated for any awards sponsored by LGBT organizations, despite accolades from many LGBT magazines, literary publications and websites. Is Beatitude gay or not gay? Not gay enough, someone suggested. Whatever that means.

11. Starving, hysterical, naked. So what? While clearing the rights to several literary excerpts that appear in Beatitude, I discovered I had included two poems I’d heard Allen Ginsberg read—“Like Other Guys” and “Carl Solomon Dream”—that, surprisingly, had never been published. Even more surprisingly, Ginsberg’s literary agent granted permission to feature the poems in Beatitude, the first time they would be published anywhere. As a Beat aficionado, I couldn’t have been more thrilled. Even better, two unpublished Allen Ginsberg poems were an unexpected and amazing promotional opportunity. Though I alerted every major poetry publication about the poems, and each asked for a copy of Beatitude, not one has ever mentioned either the poems or the book. I wasn’t expecting an article or a review, but I did think that the discovery of two previously unpublished poems by one the giants of modern poetry would merit a few sentences. Lesson learned: It’s extremely challenging for a first-time author published by an independent press to get attention. Allen Ginsberg also appears in the book trailer I produced for Beatitude. With Johnny Depp. No one cared about that, either.

12. The unseen scheme. It’s difficult to choose the single most significant aspect of being an author, but if pressed, I’d say it’s the connections that Beatitude has both forged and fortified. As Beatitude has made its way in the world, I’ve met fellow Beats, other authors, readers, reviewers, bloggers, booksellers and a multitude of assorted literary types. A few are famous—composer David Amram wrote a testimonial for the cover, City Lights Bookstore co-founder, publisher and poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti sent a postcard thanking me for the book I sent him—but most simply saw something of themselves in Harry and Jay, inspired, perhaps, by their loyalty and dedication to each other in the face of forces that might drive them apart. From that first unexpected email from a reader, Beatitude has turned strangers into friends, taken friendships to another level and brought my closest even closer. I couldn’t ask for more from 77,000 words wrapped in an illustration of a cat with a New York City subway token for an eye. I couldn’t ask for more, period.

13. Once an author, always an author. One of the best things about being an author? I’ll always be an author. Even if I never write another book. Staring at the four copies of Beatitude at The Strand, I noticed one had a sticker on the cover—“A Strand Signed Copy”—the final volume from a dozen I’d signed months earlier on a visit to the store with my best friend. He had urged me to offer to inscribe the books, which we found prominently displayed on the first floor Gift Ideas table, but I was self-consciously hesitant to follow his advice. When I finally did so, the manager couldn’t have been happier. I was glad to see three unsigned copies on the shelf, an indication that the original stack had sold out and the store had ordered more. And though my best friend wasn’t with me at that moment, his words were. I signed the books. The manager added stickers. And before I left, the books were back on the Gift Ideas table. Yep, I’m an author.




Larry Closs is author of the novel Beatitude, founder and editor of TrekWorld, an adventure travel magazine, and director of communications for Next Generation Nepal, a nonprofit that reconnects trafficked children with their families. He has been a writer, editor, photographer and videographer for News Corporation, Time Warner, Hearst and Viacom. He has produced digital shorts for the Travel Channel and his photographs and videos have been featured by CNN, The Huffington Post, USA Today, HarperCollins and The Nate Berkus Show. Follow him on his site, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and Google+.