Let’s hear one of your rejection letters - not one of those flattering close-calls, but a real doozy, like the kind you might get from C. Michael Curtis.
Come on. They don’t hurt so bad when you see we’ve all got ‘em!
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Wednesday, Jessica Keener will be here to talk about being on both sides of the rejection slip - as a writer who receives them and as an editor who sends them out. See you Wednesday!
And it’s been far too long since I’ve linked the fabulous Tommy Kane. Love this drawing he did on cardboard. And coming soon are the drawings he did on his trip to Morocco. Go check him out and tell him what a hotshot he is.
Now, don’t get mad at me, but there’s no weekly wrap. The answer to this week’s question is pretty much the story of my novel, which I need to focus on today.
Agents and publishers interested in contacting my guest or reading his manuscripts: OChurm@aol.com
My guest today is not the only one hanging around LitPark who goes by a pen name. But today he is stepping out from behind the mask.
If you are a regular reader of McSweeney’s, you know Oronte Churm as the author of “Dispatches from Adjunct Faculty at a Large State University” - an anatomy of being a teacher, writer, husband, father, and son. In short, it’s about a whole life’s education, which never ends. Churm is also busy writing for Inside Higher Ed, where he keeps a creative nonfiction superblog called The Education of Oronte Churm. He’s been a contributing editor for Adjunct Advocate, writes for World’s Fair, a Seed Media science site, and has a piece in Mountain Man Dance Moves (McSweeney’s Books).
So what’s the story of the guy behind the pen name? Well, if you click over to McSweeney’s, you can read the beautiful essay in which he reveals his true identity. It’s an essay that made me tear up again and again because it touches on almost everything I’ve been struggling with these past many months as I’ve tried to edit my book. That he manages to weave stories of ghosts, his dying father, porn star Ron Jeremy, and salvation into this one story shows why he’s my kind of writer and my kind of friend. I hope you’ll find the time to read it.
But first, while you’re here, I’d like to introduce you to my friend, Churm, who is also my friend, John Griswold.
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What made you use the name, Oronte Churm, to begin with? Why didn’t you want to use your real name?
John Warner, the editor of McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, asked me in 2005 to write a column about being an adjunct lecturer at Illinois. He said I could use a pen name, since I’m not on the tenure track and don’t have that job protection. Neither of us knew, I think, what I might have to say, or whether anyone would frown on it. But I was also trying to finish a literary novel and wanted to keep humorous bits separate from the rest of my intended writing life. As it turned out, I’ve tried to do more with my dispatches than I think John expected from me—never waste a good publishing platform, my mother always said—and he’s been terrifically supportive of their oddity.
The pen name is a combination of two characters’ names from the Henry James story “The Real Thing,” which I was teaching at the time. I liked the sound of them together; Oronte is floral and Churm is muddy, a comical combination. The story questions who or what is “real” in art and life, and those questions seemed pertinent to my situation as college teacher and writer.
You allude, in the McSweeney’s piece, to some people being angry about the pen name. Can you say more about that?
In a dispatch called “On Apophasis,” I revealed that an editor at a big-time publication told me, nearly apropos of nothing, that if I wrote for them I couldn’t talk about the Iraq War. I heard later that her boss, the editor-in-chief, was quite upset with me and felt it wasn’t cricket to hide, as he viewed it, behind an assumed name. It made me wonder what satisfactions he imagined having, if only I’d used my real name. Duel at dawn? Trying to get me fired? Standing in my front yard yelling epithets? He and his shop all knew my real name anyway.
To me, a pen name can easily be the same as a surname, even if it doesn’t speak to geography. If the writing is clear, thoughtful, or even frequent, the “real” aspect of the writer’s being will out. Besides, even pseudonymous writers can be denounced, and most have e-mail. Writers have never been as accessible as they are now.
Talk to me about how it feels behind the mask.
It feels great. It feels like bunnies, like lilacs on a spring night, like good whisky and smiting one’s enemies. It feels like the 1938 Carnegie Hall performance of “Sing, Sing, Sing” with the tom-tom beat of Gene Krupa and an unexpected and miraculous piano solo by Jess Stacy. Step back here a minute, Friend, and I’ll show you what it feels like.
Any downside to wearing a mask?
We all wear masks and change them according to the social situation. Usually we feel each to be “true,” even when one contradicts the one before it. A pen name is no different. I see nothing unusual about being Churm; it’s simply my persona for a certain context and is invisible to me at that moment.
I guess you won’t truly be able to answer this till you’re officially outed and start getting feedback, but do you expect you’ll feel free? Naked? Like Oz when he’s discovered behind the curtain, and people think, Oh, I thought he’d be bigger?
I’m actually a giant of a man, lewd and bulging, but comfortable in my existential skin. If someone can’t handle my nakedness, he can always avert his gaze.
Why now? What has happened or changed in you that you would rather be John than Oronte?
As Churm, I’ve amassed considerable nonfiction work, and I’m proud of it. I want to unify my two writing lives, if only to aid in further publishing and getting a tenure-track gig. Anyway, I’ll continue to write as Oronte in several venues, including at Inside Higher Ed, where I’m signing on for another year. Churm, c’est moi.
Want to say anything about McSweeney’s, or some of the other folks you’ve written for?
I can’t say enough about the impeccable taste, keen intelligence, and boyish good looks of Internet Tendency editor John Warner. Also, I had dinner with Dave Eggers once, and I’ll just say this: The man can eat the hell out of some chocolate cake.
I’m very grateful to McSweeney’s for everything, including introductions to some great good friends and opportunities for other work. The dispatches led to my being a contributing editor at Adjunct Advocate, and a year ago Inside Higher Ed hired me as their first Blog U. writer. (There are now five of us.) IHE’s editors, Doug Lederman and Scott Jaschik, are incredibly supportive and have also let me try anything I wished, from an interview with a Special Forces chaplain to long essays about my emotional connections to Vietnam, where I was born. Somewhere in there I talk about teaching, too. Lately I’ve been hanging with the scientists at The World’s Fair, a Seed Media science blog. I ask them if they intend to blow up the world, and they tell me I’m funny.
I’ll put it out there that I love McSweeney’s, too. There’s a good many people over there I consider to be like family. But let’s get to the contest because I know my readers want to win this money so they can buy more books.
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The Little Truths Writing Contest:
Your submissions to the contest go right here in the comments section. Enter as often as you like!
In honor of Oronte Churm’s revelation of his real name and previously undisclosed location, his online friends are sponsoring a short writing contest with big-time prizes.
Write a creative nonfiction story or essay, 75 (seventy-five!) words or less, in which someone reveals something, is unmasked, or comes to a new understanding. (This is most of literature, by the way.) We call these “little truths.”
Clear, concise, vivid prose—memoir, journalism, or lyric all welcome. Memoir and narrative are best told with scenes and detail, not explanation, and even the personal essay form benefits from image and sensory language. Bernard Cooper suggests that short nonfiction ‘requires an alertness to detail, a quickening of the senses, a focusing of the literary lens, so to speak, until one has magnified some small aspect of what it means to be human.’ We agree.
Here is a little truth, exactly 75 words long, from Somerset Maugham’s notebooks:
We were sitting in a wine shop in Capri when Norman came in and told us T. was about to shoot himself. We were startled. Norman said that when T. told him what he was going to do he could think of no reason to dissuade him. “Are you going to do anything about it?” I asked. “No.” He ordered a bottle of wine and sat down to await the sound of the shot.
Mr. Maugham is currently dead and therefore ineligible to win this contest, so send your own little truth along. Enter as many times as you like! Post entries as comments to this posting by midnight, Friday, March 7, 2008. By entering the contest, you agree to allow Inside Higher Ed to re-post and archive your entry at their site, though all rights revert to you.
Entries can be funny, sad, ironic, hip, morose, hopeful, or anything else you want them to be, but they should be both true and True.
The judge:
The judge will be Steve Davenport, Creative Nonfiction Editor of Ninth Letter, and Associate Director of the Creative Writing Program at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Steve’s first book, Uncontainable Noise, won Pavement Saw Press’s Transcontinental Poetry Prize. More importantly, he may be the basis for the character-foil “Rory” in Churm’s dispatches and blog.
The prizes:
Grand Prize is a $100 VISA Gift Card, courtesy of Inside Higher Ed, your online source for news, opinion and jobs for all of higher education, and the proud home of The Education of Oronte Churm.
First Prize is courtesy of McSweeney’s: A $50 gift certificate to the McSweeney’s store, where you can find everything from magazine subscriptions to books to tattoos to the original circus t-shirt.
Second Prize is courtesy of featherproof books, a young indie publisher based in Chicago, which publishes perfect-bound, full-length works of fiction and downloadable mini-books. Get two featherproof novels of your choice and one of their “reusable, rewritable, rarely regrettable” letterTees.
Third Prize (two to be given) is the debut album of Les Chauds Lapins, Parlez-moi d’amour, courtesy of the hot little bunnies themselves.
John Griswold’s short stories, poems, and essays have appeared in journals such as War, Literature & the Arts, Mediphors, Palo Alto Review, and Natural Bridge, which nominated his story “Transcript of a World War I Veteran’s Narrative” for the 2001 Pushcart Prize. A piece on the Midwest will appear in the next issue of Ninth Letter, and an appreciation of poet John Balaban in the next issue of War, Literature & the Arts.
John was born in Saigon, Vietnam, and grew up in Southern Illinois. He served as an Army deep-sea diver, earned a BA in English and philosophy, and worked as a corporate writer for several years. His MFA is from the University of Miami, Coral Gables, and since 2000 he’s taught undergrads creative writing and literature at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
His novel, A Democracy of Ghosts, and a collection of essays based on the dispatches are under submission to publishers. He’s currently working on a memoir, tentatively titled How We Become Men.
Agents and publishers interested in contacting my guest or reading his manuscripts: OChurm@aol.com
What do you hope people will believe about you that couldn’t be further from the truth?
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Wednesday’s guest is going to appear a little later than usual because I’m coordinating my show with McSweeney’s. Sometime Wednesday morning, one of their regular feature writers, also a friend of mine, will reveal his true identity over there, while here at LitPark, that friend and I will talk about the mask he’s been wearing.
Now, for those of you who would like to win some money and some attention from a top-notch lit mag editor, there will also be a contest, so be sure to stop by!
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Some quick shout-outs to the lovely folks I met Saturday at The Bowery Poetry Club:
Kim Brittingham, who read her sassy, poignant, and seriously funny essay called Fat is Contagious. She will be talking about this essay Wednesday on The Today Show - they even followed her around with hidden cameras! So if any of you know how to turn your TVs on and can send a link (particularly a legal one that doesn’t hurt our poor Hollywood writers who have been through so much), I’ll be happy to post what you’ve got. (If you don’t have my email, and you shouldn’t - it’s only for my mom and my agent, mostly - then you can send that link directly to my webmaster, Terry Bain, who is much friendlier about receiving email.)
Heather Maidat, who told me, after I read, that I closed a certain chapter in her life, and the conversation we had about that meant a whole lot to me.
Shoaleh Teymour, who is so absolutely sweet and wipes tears away when she talks.
Lisa Haas, who not only made us all feel comfortable and welcome, but is also the director of Creative Evolution, which supports women with works-in-progress in literature, and I think, film.
Oh, and I was also so happy to finally meet Rachel Kramer Bussel, and I want to apologize to her for hugging her so much except for she’s so awfully cute!
I asked Mr. Henderson how he would characterize my driving, and he said, “Timid… to the point of being unsafe.” My back-seat driving, on the other hand is all confidence!
I was surprised to learn that most of you who answered this week’s driving question characterize yourselves as bad, distracted, or exceptionally cautious drivers. I’m not sure what I expected, but it wasn’t that. I dislike driving for two main reasons: My head likes to wander, so I find the whole experience of remembering where you’re going and reading signs and knowing which lane to be in incompatible with daydreaming. And I find being strapped in and forced to keep my hands on the wheel incompatible with being a restless workaholic.
I’ll tell you a little driving story, but first let me tell you where I’m giving a reading this weekend:
Saturday, Feb 16th, 12-3pm - The Bowery Poetry Club - $10
308 Bowery, New York, NY 10012
212.614.0505
The club is right across from CBGB’s, at the foot of First Street, between Houston & Bleecker. (That’s the F train to Second Ave, or the 6 train to Bleecker.) If it looks long and expensive to you, well, hey, I was thinking the same thing. But I hope some of you come down and keep me company while my hands and voice shake at the microphone.
Okay, here’s a little driving story. I’ll call it, The Fog Storm.
When I was fresh out of graduate school, I answered an ad for a counselor in a group home. I was just right for the job. The trouble was getting there. I’m not good with directions, so Mr. H and I did a practice run and it was pretty far away.
I have some unusual phobias related to driving, but most seem to go away if I just close my eyes. For example, I can navigate a tunnel better with my eyes closed because that keeps me from overcorrecting and hyperventilating about hitting the wall.
I felt confident in my get-the-job outfit. I am a great interviewee and I knew I’d land the job if I could just find the building. I started early, didn’t want to be rushed, didn’t want to get anything wrong. And since it was raining, I wanted extra time to perhaps blow dry my hair in a bathroom before my appointment.
What I was unprepared for was the fog storm. By the time I got on the highway, the fog became so bad it was like driving inside a thick white cloud. I couldn’t see if I was in my lane, much less see exit signs. I slowed to under 20 MPH. The amazing thing, and what made me so angry about the selfishness and impatience of other drivers, was that other cars whizzed by, despite the weather and the danger it could cause.
Somehow, though I have no memory how I did it, I found my way to an exit and pulled into a 7-Eleven parking lot. I was in a terrible mood because I didn’t know how I’d get to the interview on time (and I am never late to anything). I was mad at the weather and mad that I’d pulled off the road and was no longer able to follow the simple directions Mr. Henderson had written down for me.
I called him from a phone booth, described the fog storm, told him there was no way I could go back out there. In fact, I admitted, just before I called him, I’d called the person I planned to interview with and explained that the drive was just too far and I was sorry for any inconvenience I caused. “Are you still there?”
“Mhmm.”
“Good. You weren’t saying anything. I’m so embarrassed about the whole thing. I’d rather have told them after they offered me the job. Now here’s the pesky part,” I said. “Kind of a favor.”
More quiet, so I proceeded.
“I need you to come and get me so I can follow you home.” And before he could fuss, I said, “Please don’t be mad at me. I can’t help the weather.”
Mr. Henderson listened carefully, continued his silence a while longer, then calmly asked, “How is that fog storm now?”
I looked around, and can you believe, it was gone. “It’s gone,” I told him.
“Remind me to show you where the defrost button is,” he said.
I waited in my car until he found me. Mr. Henderson is one of the kindest, least likely to anger people I know, but he suggested that I just follow him home, and when we got there, to leave him alone for a while.
Unfortunately, the very things that make some people angry, I find hysterical. I rolled up my window so he couldn’t hear me laughing. Do people really know the function of every single button in their cars?
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Quick but cool announcement for those who don’t hang out in the LitPark Comments section…
Sue, Tish
My girl, Tish Cohen, has not only had her book, TOWN HOUSE, optioned by Fox 2000, with Pulitzer Prize winning screenwriter Doug Wright (Quills, Memoirs of a Geisha) adapting it to screen, but now…
TOWN HOUSE is on the short-list for the Commonwealth Prize for Best First Book in the region of Canada and the Caribbean. How great is that?!
My guest today is Bridgett M. Davis, author of SHIFTING THROUGH NEUTRAL (Amistad). This debut novel, set in 1970s Detroit, focuses on Rae Dodson as her parents’ marriage and father’s health disintegrate. It’s a compassionate story about what a young girl holds on to when her family comes up short.
Bridgett is also the writer, producer, and director of the award-winning independent film, NAKED ACTS, the story of a young actress, Cicely, whose mother starred in Foxy Brown-type soft porn films. Now Cicely must make a choice about whether to shed her clothes for a film she’s been cast in, and where things go from there will surprise you.
I hope you’ll give this smart and big-hearted writer a warm welcome!
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I wanted to talk to you about some of the themes that run through both your movie and your book. The heartbreaker for me was seeing young women wanting so badly to have a sense of belonging and to know they are valued by others, particularly their mothers. In both cases - though in different ways - these young women do not get what they need. Can you talk to me about this, about yearning for something you may never get?
I’m fascinated by how women become whole, how they become who they are. I think on a fundamental level, it begins for most of us with a quest to gain our mothers’ approval, and by extension, their love. That need, that desire never goes away, and it’s certainly more acute, I’m sure, in women who don’t get the reassurance they need. As a writer, I like to explore what those women must do to compensate for what their mothers couldn’t give them, and what they must do ultimately to accept their mothers’ limitations and move on.
This brings me to a second theme that runs through both works - about women seeking to feel whole despite their circumstances. How do these women find happiness and self-love when it’s not necessarily what they’re taking in?
In my novel, the main character, Rae, had her father to compensate for what her mother didn’t/couldn’t give her, and that love from him was enough to sustain her after all. In NAKED ACTS, Cicely also had someone else who loved her in a more healthy way, her grandmother. I believe that it’s less important, finally, who loves a child (mother, father, sister) than how much that child knows she’s loved.
That’s a really lovely thought. I’m going to remember that….
After he returned to me, I slept every night atop Daddy’s broad back. He was a soft, wide man, and miraculously he remained still throughout our slumber - never rolled over, never pushed me off. How that sleeping arrangement came to be I do not know, but it felt as natural to me as play. - SHIFTING THROUGH NEUTRAL.
Talk to me about the theme of body image in these two works.
Body image is obviously a big theme in NAKED ACTS, as I wanted to explore how an African American woman gains a sense of her own sexuality and relationship to her body against the backdrop of a very particular sexualized history for black women in this country. To me, they go hand in hand - themes of self realization and body image. How do you accept yourself until you accept your body?
“If you start crying now over every little thing, you’ll be crying for the rest of your life.” - Lydia Love to her daughter, NAKED ACTS.
Both of your works take a very compassionate stance toward the characters who come up short - the absent parents and cheating lovers. Where does Bridgett Davis get that kind of compassion?
You ask about my compassion. As a writer, I’m completely uninterested in blame and easy targets. The real challenge and interest for me is in trying to understand each character’s complexity. I care for all of my major characters. Even the minor characters whom I wouldn’t want to hang out with are compelling to me as a writer, because they each have a point of view, a way of seeing the world, something they’ve been through that informs their actions.
The biggest compliment I’ve received for SHIFTING THROUGH NEUTRAL is from folks who say they loved the father character. That suggests to me that I captured his humanity, that it came through despite his myriad flaws. I also love it when someone says they “felt for” the mother. As the writer, it’s never my job to judge a character, nor is it my job to make them do what they “should” do. I want them to do what’s probable given the history I’ve created for them. That’s what excites me about writing!
I could, if I stood on tiptoe, peek through the triangle of colored stained glass at the top. Blue, pink, and yellow. I imagined this was how the world looked to Mama when she took one of her pills - warm and tinted. - SHIFTING THROUGH NEUTRAL
Did you find a big difference between writing a novel versus a screenplay?
I love writing fiction for different reasons from why I love writing screenplays. With fiction, the work feels a lot more visceral and internal, and personal. Not that the subject matter is personal per se, but the process is deeply so.
With screenwriting, I love the structure. Screenplays are all about structure and that allows me to use a different side of my brain, to think about what story to pour into a given paradigm vs. with my fiction when I write all this stuff and then try to figure out what prism it demands to be told through. I like going back and forth with the two genres as a way of balancing the two processes.
I’ve been working on a novel now for over 4 years and it’s been a long haul. About a year ago I started co-writing a screenplay, and that was just the antidote I needed after so many years fixated on this internal, solitary work. The screenplay is collaborative by nature, and I find that refreshing. I’m a novelist but for years I was a journalist and I find screenwriting the perfect marriage of those two different pursuits.
They dug a grave for him in the backyard, beneath the apple tree. That misfortune was like a pothole on a dark road. An old clunker could charge right through it, but a new car, its axle untested, never rides the same again. - SHIFTING THROUGH NEUTRAL.
Did you learn anything in the process of editing your book or your screenplay that you could pass along to a writer who’s editing her first book?
My advise? First, put some distance between you and the book. Let a month, even two go by before you return to edit it. Distance is key. And then, when you do return to it, read it aloud. And if you’re not already, join a writer’s group of a few fellow writers whose sensibilities and style you admire. I’m in a group of just 3 women at the moment and it works beautifully. Their feedback is enormously helpful to me.
Worst of all were any telltale signs of low-class living on the outside of the house, the greatest offense being car parts strewn across a back lawn. Mama was very conscious of the responsibility of living next to white folks, even after most of those who’d been our neighbors had moved away. - SHIFTING THROUGH NEUTRAL
What are you working on now?
My new novel is entitled LAGOS and it’s the story of a young African American woman who embarks on her first trip to Africa, where she discovers herself in ways that have nothing to do with finding her roots.
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Bio:
Bridgett M. Davis is an associate professor of English at the City University of New York’s Baruch College, where she teaches creative writing and literature. A graduate of Spelman College in Atlanta, she is the director of the award–winning feature film Naked Acts and author of the novel Shifting through Neutral. Davis’s journalism has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Philadelphia Inquirer, Columbia Journalism Review, Detroit Free Press, New York, Newsday, and the Chicago Tribune. In 2007, she was honored by the New York Association of Black Journalists with its Excellence in Education Award.She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband and son.
You’ll have to hurry to get this collector’s edition of the book with Brian McEntee’s name misspelled in it because future editions will be corrected. And if you want to hear a little more about kittens, I blogged about them here.
One day, while visiting a website I’m addicted to, I took the challenge it gave its readers to tell their life stories in six words. Typical of me, I typed in an answer, clicked SUBMIT, and later wondered what I’d written. You can see my impulsive act - along with entries from Stephen Colbert, Amy Sedaris, Jonathan Lethem and Richard Ford - in the book, NOT QUITE WHAT I WAS PLANNING: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous & Obscure.
Please welcome Larry Smith and Rachel Fershleiser, editors of SMITH Magazine and the folks behind this weird and wonderful book!
Tell me about SMITH Magazine. How would you define what it’s about and who your readers are?
Larry: SMITH is like a rollicking backyard barbecue. There might be a few famous writers milling around, but they’re just in the mix among the whole group. People are swapping stories, telling tales, and then bringing them back home and repeating the ones that stuck to them the most. Our tagline, which we repeat like a mantra, is “everyone has a story,” and that more than anything defines what SMITH Mag is about. We believe that storytelling should be egalitarian, accessible, and fun. On the site we’ve both made the barrier to entry extremely easy, and also made a point of showing that your words can be published right alongside some of the best-known writers of our day. Our storytelling playing field is a level one.
Rachel: Another thing I like to point out about SMITH is that it’s about personal storytelling in the interactive media age. Our “stories” aren’t just text - they’re YouTube videos, photo essays, podcasts, and serialized comics. There’s never been a richer time for sharing your quirks and obsessions with likeminded people around the world.
You just did a big re-design of the site. Want to share some of the new bells and whistles?
Larry: The biggest change is we’ve had a number of community tools (shameless plug: lovingly built by Ben Brown’s XOXCO company) that have nearly overnight helped us move from a more traditional magazine (editors assign and edit stories; some pieces come in over the transom) to a real populist storytelling community (the gates are more open). The stories are driven by readers, but curated by professional editors. We’ve set up “story projects” so that readers can pick a topic, write a story, make a headline, add a pullquote, include a picture, a hyperlink, and add tags if they like. Then we feature the best stuff but let everything else have a place on the table. Readers have profiles - “these are the stories I wrote, these are my favorite stories I’ve read,” that sort of thing. We’re creating an uncomplicated but we hope high-energy spot to tell and share stories. Some of our storytellers will just get a thrill out of seeing their words out there for the first time. Others will get book deals.
Rachel: And there’s still editor-assigned content - features on people with unique lives and obsessions, interviews with published memoirists. It’s interesting and entertaining like any magazine, and it’s inspiration for our community.
Do you see advantages to writers being published online vs. in print? And do you think blogging and online publishing has changed the nature of writing?
Larry: I think a couple things are happening which feed into each other. The gap between the cachet of print and online is closing: being published on a well-respected online magazine, or solely on the web site of a print publication doesn’t feel second-tier at all. At the same time, we expect more of our bloggers - better writing, cleaner copy, few factual errors. What’s more, your writing of course gets much more exposure if it’s on the web - I think my father is the last person in America to still clip and mail articles.
Rachel: A lot our pieces really belong on the web - you can click through to find out more about the people involved, watch an embedded video, or comment and get a response. I’m also really unimpressed by the hand wringing over the web making us less literate. Granted, I judge people harshly for “u,” use impeccable punctuation even in text messages, and consider emoticons against my religion. But as a society, I think we spend much more time reading and writing than we did pre-internet, and that blogs, and even emails and instant messaging, have encouraged people to streamline their use of language for the better.
Give me some examples of pieces you think really define your magazine.
Larry: When you break it down, SMITH features three kinds of stories: Reader-driven stories like the six-word memoirs; hybrid pieces, like Writing the Whip, the diary of a working dominatrix, which is essentially an edited and well-written blog; then we have pieces that are more or less assigned and handled in classic magazine style. These range from a photo essays and interview with Leonard Nimoy about his photos of large women to excerpts and interviews from new memoirs like Felicia Sullivan’s, recently posted in “Memoirville” to ambitious serialized webcomics like Shooting War (which became a book this past fall) and A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge (now in its ninth chapter).
It’s all linked by what we call “the chicken’s-eye view” - the perspective from the ground up - the individual take on the micro and macro world around him. In A.D., we tell the Katrina story by following the lives of five un-famous people over the course of the year; and, what the hell, let’s tell that story in comic form and include podcasts and videos of the real-life “characters” because, well, we can. Our love of personal narrative pushed us to create a storytelling community. Then we used the tools readily available to us and anyone with a laptop and decent net connection to lead our readers into a world of storytelling I don’t think any of us knew was so possible just a few years ago.
Rachel: Basically, it’s true, it’s personal, and it all opens a window into a part of the world you may not have thought about before. Above all, it’s a story that inspires you to tell one of your own.
Tell me something about the two of you outside of your work at SMITH.
Larry: To support my online storytelling habit, I work part-time for ESPN mag, where I used to be an editor. I also freelance for other places whenever I can, but there’s not much spare time, and don’t expect there to be soon, but that’s the deal with a startup, a deal I’d make again. I live with Piper Kerman, a woman I met 12 years ago and married two years ago (and whose own life story is being published by Spiegel & Grau later this year; it’s a good one). We are the only married people in our thirties in Park Slope without kids, however I do have a mild pregnant women obsession.
I also love yoga, have my weekly hoops game, and traveling. I managed to combine those three passions in a recent freelance piece for Men’s Journal. An editor called me and said, “Hey, don’t you know basketball and yoga?” - a sentence I never thought I’d hear. A few weeks later I was in Bora Bora doing a piece on a yoga retreat for pro basketball players - that’s as good I can imagine in my life as a freelancer.
Rachel: I also freelance write in time I don’t really have, and work at Housing Works Bookstore Café, an amazing nonprofit bookstore that raises money to fight AIDS and homelessness. It’s got all my favorite things - books, music, movies, wifi, coffee, and smart strangers to talk to. It’s a perfect counterpoint to staring at my iBook alone in my room for days at a time.
How did you come up with the idea of the six-word memoir, and how did that strange idea catch fire?
Rachel: There’s a literary legend that Hemingway was once challenged to write a story in six words and he came up with, “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” We always liked that, but we’re living in a confessional, voyeuristic age, and doing memoirs seemed like the logical evolution. SMITH is all about telling your own story, so autobiography was a natural fit. It’s a fresh twist on a classic.
It caught on through the peculiar magic of the web - we partnered with Twitter, and their audience is people who like to write short messages and broadcast them. Then it was blogged to death and emailed around. In a few weeks, we had thousands of submissions, and we heard that teachers were assigning six-word memoirs to their students, families were trading them across dinner tables, and pet fanatics were writing them for their dogs.
Larry: It caught fire, we suspect, for a few reasons. Everyone has a story and everyone should have a place to tell it - for a year folks had been doing it at SMITH before we launched six words. But the six-word memoirs taught us a few things. For one thing, parameters are paramount - people appreciate guidelines. But I think the main reason people responded with such energy, passion, poignancy and humor to our six-word challenge is because we asked them. We said: Hey, we have Dave Eggers and Joyce Carol Oates’ six-word memoir, and you know what? We’d like yours, too.
Rachel: And the six-word format really lowered the bar to entry. People who might otherwise have said, “I’m not a writer,” or even just, “Who has the time,” said, “I can do that.” And once they started to, some of them couldn’t stop.
Did anything surprise you about the submissions?
Larry: The volume, for one. When we launched the six-word memoir as a challenge in November 2006, we had a solid growing, reader and writer base, but we weren’t such a huge site that we expected to get 15,000+ submissions in just a few months. From there, the intensity of so many of the memoirs took us by surprise - people really went deep in six words. This book is just over 800 of the more than submissions we received (and still receive on smithmag.net every day) and we could easily fill many more books without repetition or diminishing quality of the short, short life stories. So while we are huge believers in the power of storytelling, the power of just six well-chosen words really blew us away.
Rachel: I was most struck by the honesty. I couldn’t believe the things people were willing to say and attach their names to - that they didn’t love their spouses, regretted having their children, or even just how lonely they feel. I’m think people found it cathartic and somehow validating.
Having now worked to put a book together, what have you learned behind the scenes that you can pass along about editing, collaborating or publicity?
Larry: Your community are your best advocates. In our case, we have the SMITH community, but we have a brilliant subset of contributors to the book who are a truly passionate community. Part of the reason they’re so involved is that we kept them in the loop at every step. When we got a book deal for six-word memoirs, which obviously was not some huge deal, we had one request we insisted they abide by: every contributor gets a book. And 832 books is a lot of books, even for HarperCollins, which has been great to us. Each book represents an author, one whom we’re proud to have, and who seems proud to be a part of the book.
Rachel: Here’s my brutal honesty, in exchange for the honesty our contributors gave us: Editing a book like this is tons and tons of grunt work - at times we felt like our own interns. It’s dozens of spreadsheets and weeks of copy-pasting. It’s creating distro lists and mass emailing and answering the same questions a hundred times. Publicity is probably more work than making the book in the first place, and takes a whole slew of passionate people. If you collaborate on a book, at some point you’ll want to kill each other. And it is all so, so totally worth it.
Larry: And to some extent is chaos theory - we tried and are still trying everything. So it’s like: OK, let’s send out emails and snail mails to all the contributors. Let’s start a six-word Facebook group. Has anyone updated the MySpace page lately? Then we see that HarperCollins has created an ecard for the book - awesome, let’s get that going around. And while HarperCollins is trying to get us on The Today Show, we’re Twittering out one great six worder a day to our Twitter “followers”. So it’s a real mix of old school and new school, a professional PR team and complete guerilla style promotion.
But I don’t thing anything has gotten people more excited about what this book is all about, and how powerful six words can be than the video. One weekend SMITH co-founder, Tim Barkow, decided to take some of the memoirs and mess around. When he looked up 18 hours later, he had made this incredible video. We bought the rights to a catchy song for $25, synched it up, and voila, the six-word memoir video’s racking up views on YouTube.
And just to round out the insanity, when I see someone reading The New Yorker on the subway, I hand them a postcard for the book and say, “Hey, if you love storytelling, you’ll love this book; and lots of writers you read in that magazine are in it.” I’m sure I scare people, but I know that they would love the book if they pick it up. For $12, I hope they’ll at least find out if they do. That’s something like 2 cents a story, which is a little silly to think about, but, you know, we’re just are so excited about this little book. It’s a manifestation of everything we hold believe about storytelling: populist, accessible, fun, profound, and addictive.
Rachel Fershleiser has written for The Village Voice, New York Press, Print, and other publications. She’s SMITH’s memoir editor and lives in New York City.
Larry Smith founded SMITH Magazine on January 6, 2006, which was already National Smith Day. Most recently, he was the articles editor of Men’s Journal, and has been the executive editor of Yahoo! Internet Life, senior editor at ESPN magazine, and a founding editor of P.O.V. and Might magazines. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Wired, Popular Science, Men’s Health, Salon, and Slate.
Can you tell your life story in six words? Give it a try.
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Wednesday, the editors of Smith Magazine will be here to talk about the six-word memoirs they collected into a book called NOT QUITE WHAT I WAS PLANNING. Hope you’ll be back to join the conversation!
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Oh… and a reminder! Have you entered the Charles Shaughnessy Morning Song Writing Competition yet? I hope, if you haven’t, that you will today because it’s a fabulous opportunity to reach an entirely new audience with your writing. Also, any LitPark regulars who win the contest will win a prize from me!
Don’t know what this contest is about? Well, it was inspired by this song, written by LitPark guest, Robin Lerner and sung by LitPark guest, David Habbin. Listen to Morning Song, and think about some of the losses you’ve experienced in your life. Then write about one of those losses, with the emphasis being on anything positive you’ve gained because of it. Charlie explains this better here.
There has been one change to the original contest rules: the word limit is now 400 words. (You can read why the rule was changed over here.) If you entered when the word count was 200 and felt limited by that, you can enter again! The new deadline is March 17th, 2008. Rock out, guys. I can’t wait to award something all of you want to the winner!
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Oh, wait, for no reason at all (okay, okay, the real reason is to embarrass him), I am posting a photo of someone you regulars know very well… but maybe you’ve never seen him quite like this!
Sue, Tish
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