MCWC The Mendocino Quill

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1/22/2017

As of February 1, 2017, our blog will be moving to mcwc.org/blog. We hope you'll continue to join us there!

'Tis the season to be…writing?

12/16/2016

By Cameron Lund, MCWC Social Community Manager

Sometimes in the rush of the holidays—the stress of cooking, of navigating crowded grocery aisles, of choosing, buying, and wrapping a mountain of presents—it’s hard to find the time and the motivation to write. But as writers, it’s important for us to keep our creative spark alive even when curling up to watch a holiday movie marathon seems a lot easier. We contacted some former MCWC faculty members to see if they had “little gifts of wisdom” to inspire us this holiday season and keep us on track. Here are a few tips to imbibe with the eggnog:

Brooke Warner, Publisher:
Try not to feel guilty when you carve out time for yourself just because you have family in town, or kids home from school. Your loved ones will appreciate your boundaries! Be mindful of the excuse that it’s December, so you’ll just start up again in January, as if that’s not the most tired New Year’s Resolution ever. December can be a very productive month, but you have to allow it to be. Schedule writing dates with yourself, and maybe treat yourself to some holiday treats as rewards for keeping the dates.

Elizabeth Rosner, Author:
Remind yourself as often as possible that there is something only you can write. Allow yourself to proceed in bursts, with silences for listening deeper and deeper. The words will find you. Now, more than ever, the world needs each individual voice to be heard.

Victoria Zackheim, Author:
As simplistic as it sounds, write from the heart. It's not always easy, and it can be painful, but the emotions are honest, and your readers will resonate to that honesty. Mystery writer Anne Perry says it well: Put your heart on the page.

Susan Woolridge, Poet:
1. Persistence! Be like the water buffalo. When this heavy animal crosses a river he gets stuck in the mud bottom if he stops. If he just keeps the slightest movement forward he makes it across safely. Put numbers on pages! Tinker with titles. Whatever keeps the chapter or essay or poem alive.

2. Write to discover, not to recount what you already know. Keep at it till you uncover something—let a surprise come forth for you. This will delight your reader, and again, keep your writing alive.

How are you keeping yourself motivated this holiday season? Do you have a favorite piece of writing advice? Let us know and we could publish your advice in a future blog!

News:

We're co-hosting a literary art installation and open mic event on Jan 14th with Flockworks! Here's how to participate:

1. Write 200 words on the prompt "I am"—this can be in whatever form you choose: manifesto, flash fiction, poem, memoir…

2. Bring your work to the Odd Fellows Hall, 45101 Ukiah Street, Mendocino, on Saturday, January 14th between 4:00 p.m. and 5:30 p.m. Photographer Mimi Carroll will be there to take your portrait.

3. Watch as your writing and portrait become a part of a real-time literary art installation!

4. Sign up to read your work at the 6:00pm open mic.

You can find more detailed information here, or contact info@mcwc.org.

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Congratulations to Marion Deeds! Her story “Never Truly Yours” was workshopped at MCWC 2016 and has since been accepted by the fiction podcast PodCastle to be read by a professional narrator.

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She Writes Press is launching a scholarship program for a woman of color in 2017. You can find more information here: http://shewritespress.com/scholarship-donations/

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We are also proud to announce a new scholarship for a woman of color to attend MCWC 2017. This will be offered as part of our new Diverse Voices scholarships. More details will be available at mcwc.org after February 1.

This is your opportunity to help make sure marginalized voices get heard! We are still looking for additional donors to fund MCWC Diverse Voices scholarships. Please contact director@mcwc.org if you're in the position to help, or for more information.

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Support MCWC on AmazonSmile
Visit AmazonSmile and select Mendocino Coast Writers Conference as your charitable organization of choice. For every eligible purchase, the AmazonSmile Foundation will donate 0.5% of the purchase price to MCWC

Do you have a story to share or an exciting announcement? Let us know by emailing news@mcwc.com.

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How To Win Friends and Influence...

11/15/2016

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By Cameron Lund, MCWC Social Community Manager

Exciting things are happening to our past participants. We caught up with a few and heard rewarding stories about how friendships formed at MCWC have helped pave the road to success. And what success! We'd like to toast the many MCWC community members that have accomplishments to be proud of this holiday season.

We’d first like to congratulate Annelyse Gelman, winner of one of our Under 25 scholarships in 2015, for getting her poem “Conch” published in the October 14th issue of The New Yorker. At the conference, Gelman enjoyed working with Indigo Moor and Lisa Locascio, lauding Locascio’s talk on reading and interiority as one of the best she’d ever attended. “It felt like a perfect exploded view of someone’s else’s mind,” Gelman says. “I’m so grateful to have begun friendships with these two amazing writers at MCWC.”

Locascio, too, has some exciting news to share: her first novel, Jutland Gothic, will be published by Grove Atlantic in 2018. Although Gelman may have known her as faculty, Locascio started at MCWC as a participant in 2012. She attended Steve Almond’s fiction workshop where she met Kara Vernor, initiating a relationship that helped foster both women's successes.

Lisa Locascio reading at Get Lit

Kara Vernor, author Ken Weaver, Shirin Bridges at Get Lit

Vernor first attended MCWC in 2011(her first ever writers' conference). "Although I arrived not knowing anyone else," Vernor remembers, "I soon found people to connect with—namely Dani Burlison, who was another participant, and Shirin Bridges and Michael David Lukas, who were both faculty that year."

Those friendships led to further literary adventures. "Shirin suggested we come back to Mendocino and do a weekend writers' retreat," Vernor recalls. "The goal was to write something new with a set of interlinking story prompts. We wanted our aggregated pieces to be something like the book Finbar's Hotel, or the movie Four Rooms—each segment having its own plot line but occurring in the same time and place. I returned to MCWC in 2012 and submitted the story I wrote on that retreat to Steve Almond’s fiction workshop where I met Lisa Locascio, a fellow participant. I received great feedback all around and the story, David Hasselhoff is from Baltimore, went on to find a home at Smokelong Quarterly."

Vernor has since had her short fiction published in many literary journals such as Hobart, matchbook, Paper Darts, and Necessary Fiction. In 2016, her first fiction chapbook, Because I Wanted to Write You a Pop Song, was published by Split Lip Press. Vernor also hosts Get Lit, a reading series in Petaluma, with author Dani Burlison, whom she befriended at MCWC. Authors who've read at Get Lit include many MCWC alumni and faculty, including Lisa Locascio this past January.

"Having connected with Lisa on social media as well," Vernor says, "I saw she was editing Golden State 2017: The Best Fiction and Nonfiction from California, which features writing about life in the Golden State. I thought the story I’d brought to Steve Almond's workshop, about a woman from Montana who makes a pit stop in Mendocino en route to the California she’d seen on TV, might be a fit. Fortunately, Lisa and her team agreed, and the story was accepted for the anthology, due out in April 2017 from Outpost Books."

“For me, MCWC is the gift that keeps on giving,” Vernor says. “I mean, seriously: giving and giving and giving. I have been, and continue to be, deeply grateful for the friendships, the growth, and the opportunities it has enabled.”

You never know whom you might sit next to in a MCWC workshop, what panel will inspire you, or which speaker will become a friend. This is something that makes MCWC so special. We’re proud of all our participants who have gone on to great success, and who come back—sometimes as faculty.

Lisa Locascio, Kara Vernor, and Michael David Lukas (whose latest novel, The Forty-Third Name of God, is forthcoming from Spiegel & Grau) will all be returning as faculty at MCWC 2017, teaching an Emerging Writers' workshop, a Flash Fiction seminar, and a Novel Writing workshop respectively. We're delighted to welcome them back, and encourage you to make plans to meet them.

Michael David Lukas

We also congratulate:
• John Lescroart, past MCWC faculty and board member, for his new novel, Fatal, coming out this January
• Joycelyn Trigg, our most recent Carmen Etchenberry Freund scholarship winner, for her poem published in Caylax
• Kate Erickson, Treasurer and Board Member, for being published in this year’s Chicken Soup for the Soul, Christmas edition
• Devi Laskar, 2016 conference participant, for being named a finalist in the 2017 Press 53 Award for Poetry, for Leave Your Gods at the Door

Do you have a story to share or an exciting announcement? Let us know by emailing news@mcwc.com

News:

November 17th, 6 p.m, at the historic Mendocino Hotel, the California Writers Club hosts poet Indigo Moor's “Writing to History and Culture: Using the Tools of the Present to Illuminate the Past." Free and open to the public. WritersMendocinoCoast.org.

We're looking for artists' submissions for publication in the Noyo River Review. Artwork must be submitted electronically as RGB, TIFF, or JPG image files, with a resolution of 240 dpi or higher, and with minimum dimensions of 5 inches x 7 inches. Artists can submit up to 3 images before November 30th as e-mail attachments to sbono@comcast.net.

Past faculty Reyna Grande is having her 3rd annual Christmas toy drive. You can donate here: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/3rd-annual-christmas-toy-giveway-in-iguala-mx-mexico#/

And here's your opportunity to help make sure marginalized voices get heard: we are looking for a donor to meet a $288 dollar-for-dollar matching grant to fund a MCWC Diverse Voices scholarship. Please contact director@mcwc.org if you're in the position to help or for more information!

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A New Chapter for the MCWC

10/14/2016

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By Cameron Lund, MCWC Social Community Manager

October is the start of a new chapter for the Mendocino Coast Writers’ Conference! The beginning of the MCWC 2017 conference year brings new leadership, new ideas, and—very soon—new branding and a gorgeous new website.

Karen Lewis set the bar high as Executive Director for the past two years. Her work led to MCWC 2016, what many agree was our most successful conference to date. Karen first attended MCWC back in 1992, when she was a recently widowed mom of two pre-schoolers, writing poetry and essays to make sense of the world. “For a few days each summer, the literary world comes to our beautiful coast for a world-class writing conference,” she says. She will be stepping down and handing over her position to Shirin Yim Bridges, but will remain on the MCWC advisory board.

Shirin Yim Bridges, our new Executive Director

Shirin’s first involvement with MCWC was as a member of faculty. Since 2012 she has also served as a member of the MCWC advisory board. Shirin has a strong vision for the future, including a commitment to bringing more cultural diversity to MCWC, and to ensuring that the conference offers exciting and relevant programming for aspiring writers.

Shirin is the author of Ruby’s Wish, a Publishers Weekly Best Children’s Book and winner of the Ezra Jack Keats Award; The Umbrella Queen, which made TIME magazine’s Top 10 lists; and Mary Wrightly So Politely, which launched to starred reviews in Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, and Shelf Awareness. She is also the Head Goose of Goosebottom Books, an award-winning independent children’s book publisher.

Another change in leadership: Nona Smith, our President for the past three years is moving to the position of Vice President. Nona has served on the board for six years and has made many contributions. MCWC was the first writers’ conference she ever attended, which she says makes it dear to her heart. She is thankful for the support of the community and local donors, as well as the letters she receives from past attendees, but will continue to enjoy and develop these relationships as Vice President.

Ginny Rorby, our new President

Stepping in as President is Ginny Rorby, one of MCWC’s longest-serving board members (21 years and counting). Ginny is also the author of five novels for Middle Grade and Young Adult readers: Dolphin Sky; Hurt Go Happy, which won the American Library Association’s Schneider Family Book Award; The Outside of a Horse, and Lost in a River of Grass, which won the 2013 Sunshine State Young Readers Award. Her most recent title, How to Speak Dolphin, will be released in paperback in March of 2017.

Ginny’s long legacy knowledge of MCWC will be the perfect partner to Shirin’s fresh ideas. She says, “We’re going to be the dynamic duo. Watch this space.”

Good Bye to a Dear Friend

Our long-term friend and donor Tom Freund, 89, of Mendocino, California passed away peacefully in the early hours of September 22 in his Walnut Creek apartment, one week before his 90th birthday. Tom created a long-standing MCWC scholarship for older women writers of limited financial means in honor of his wife, Carmen Etchenberry Freund. He was a dear and dedicated friend of MCWC, and often hosted MCWC faculty. He will be very sorely missed.

Polymath, retired scientist and professor, Thomas Freund will be dearly missed by family and friends, who will remember him as a man of independent mind and unrelenting curiosity, a charming and challenging interlocutor, a Citroën connoisseur, a maker of oddly unique hors-d’oeuvres, and a long-time political progressive. He is survived by his devoted daughter Pam Freund-Striplen, his grandson Matthew Striplen, and his son-in-law Tony Striplen; and by his loving son Peter Freund, his grandson Arias Freund, and his daughter-in-law Linda Freund.

A memorial is planned at Tom's Mendocino home for 1:00PM Sunday, November 13. RSVP to fortomfreund@gmail.com for directions.

Photograph of Shirin by In Her Image Photography

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It was a Dark and Stormy Night

9/15/2016

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Carole Hetherton "Hether" Ludwick was born in London on the "worst day of the Blitz," according to her mother, who was prone to exaggeration. She grew up in Canada and Southern California and has been a long time Oakland resident. At last count, she has one husband, four children, five grandchildren and two cats, listed not necessarily in order of precedence. Her professional career has spanned 40 years, teaching Latin and the Classical Humanities to mostly willing Junior and High School students. Hether says of her writing, "It tends to emphasize the humorous and quirky things that have had the audacity and delight to show up in my life."

Hether Ludwick

Not long ago, a visit to the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest website (www.bulwer-lytton.com) to read wretched opening sentences in imaginary novels provided me with a postprandial belly laugh. It happened on a bright but otherwise cheerless afternoon owing to the internal regurgitation of un-diluted cherry juice mixed with the ice of a leftover Costco 59 cent soda. Had I also ingested the Costco Polish dog I would be writing this from the morgue right now.

Here is 2015’s winning entry:

"Seeing how the victim's body, or what remained of it, was wedged between the grill of the Peterbilt 389 and the bumper of the 2008 Cadillac Escalade EXT, officer "Dirk" Dirksen wondered why reporters always used the phrase "sandwiched" to describe such a scene since there was nothing appetizing about it, but still, he thought, they might have a point because some of this would probably end up on the front of his shirt."
—Joel Phillips, West Trenton, NJ

Those unforgettable words put me in mind of an exercise assigned at the 2016 Mendocino Coast Writer's Conference by Grant Faulkner, Executive Director of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), an organization that presents the annual challenge to write 50,000 words during the month of November. Faulkner gave us three minutes to write three sentences incorporating the following words: WEASEL, BATHROBE, WEED WHACKER, HOT ROD, SHOVEL, TEDDY BEAR.

Here are my sentences:
"A Teddy Bear attired in a Ralph Lauren bathrobe challenged the Weasel, wearing a wife beater, to a contest. The prize would be a shiny new hot rod. The contest was to see who could destroy more contraband growing objects with either a weed whacker (Weasel) or a shovel (Teddy Bear)."

Do you think I should enter the Bulwer Lytton contest next year? What would be your entry?

Grant Faulkner also got me thinking about NaNoWriMo, whose philosophy of novel writing is based on the belief that the only way to get your book out there, written, finished, etc., is to just get started and see where the spirit leads you. Or, as one of the most prolific of all authors, Joyce Carol Oates, who writes a novel just about every weekend, said, "Getting the first draft finished is like pushing a peanut with your nose across a very dirty floor."

Here are some helpful tips I jotted in class:

If you have writer's block, remember: Jack Kerouac wrote On the Road in three weeks.
You need a deadline.
Inspiration is overrated. Don't wait for it.
It takes 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to achieve mastery. (Malcolm Gladwell The Outliers)
If you want one good idea, have a hundred ideas. (Linus Pauling)
Banish your inner critic.
Thomas Edison said he liked to see how many experiments he could crowd into 24 hours.
You can't edit a blank page.
Push the words instead of being pulled by them.
Playfulness is underrated in creating wonderful stories.
Plot happens. Your intuition knows what it wants to write, so get out of your own way.
Ray Bradbury wrote, renting a typewriter for ten cents an hour, at the Public Library. And we all know that Harry Potter was what Rowling did while rocking her baby's pram at the local coffee shop.

I don’t know about you, but I’m convinced. Will SOMEONE please remind me to go to nanowrimo.org (http://nanowrimo.org/) before the Day of the Dead to sign up?

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The Art of Letter, Word & Book

8/28/2016

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Janet Self is a self-taught artist with a passion for community and creativity; painting and sculpture are key with the scale of work growing. She leads Flockworks, a non-profit supporting the creative spirit of community. Working with children and adults, she fosters imagination and a playful love of art. Her art explores "being part of something big".

Flockworks builds community through creativity at Oddfellows, a community exhibit series hosted in Mendocino. Children's banner projects take art to schools, organizations and events. Noyo Printworks is an artist led community studio at 215 Laurel St Fort Bragg devoted to letterpress, printmaking and book arts.

Amie McGee is on the Mendocino Coast Writers Conference board. She is also the Treasurer for the California Writers Club, Mendocino Coast branch and was the editor of their 2014 Anthology,Upwelling.
She submitted this blog post.

Curated by Janet Self, Flockworks’ 4th Annual “Art of Letter, Word & Book” exhibit at OddFellows Gallery in Mendocino this past May was inspiring and fun. Artists and authors alike joined to celebrate the written word with Bookmobiles, Word Journeys, and an overall appreciation of letters.
Janet's imagination is brilliant and awe inspiring. She contributes stunning pieces to the MCWC event every year, and we are lucky to have them! Don’t miss the 5th Annual Art of Letter, Word & Book exhibit in 2017. Rumor has it the derby is going to the streets!

Though blurry, the message is clear: READ!

Every author misses their deadline when typing has the Pacific in the background

Some good birds on books for the ornithologist in us all

History, ancient

ALWAYS! be prepared for Spiderbooks

A paper apron to wear when you’re cooking up a story.

A coffee table book for your guests to admire.

Poets in the Schools offered lovely jems

A word scented pencil bouquet for your love

A timely Scoundrel’s Cloak woven with propaganda

These folks couldn’t resist the journey:

The highly anticipated Bookmobile derby

And of course the Bookmoblimp

Mother Goose loves a good derby

With a good book...

or two !

Temptation

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Pick Out Your Favorite Child

8/12/2016

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Indigo Moor is a poet, playwright, and author currently residing in Sacramento, CA. His second book of poetry, Through the Stonecutter’s Window, won Northwestern University Press’s Cave Canem prize. His first book, Tap-Root, was published as part of Main Street Rag’s Editor’s Select Poetry Series.
Three of his short plays, Harvest, Shuffling, and The Red and Yellow Quartet debuted at the 60 Million Plus Theatre's Spring Playwright’s festival. His full-length stageplay,Live! at the Excelsior, was a finalist for the Images Theatre Playwright Award and has been optioned for a full length film.
A graduate of the Stonecoast MFA Program—where he studied poetry, fiction, and scriptwriting—Indigo is a past board member for the Mendocino Coast Writers Conference, a graduate member of the Artist's Residency Institute for Teaching Artists, and former Vice President of the Sacramento Poetry Center. www.indigomoor.org

Poet and playwright Indigo Moor shares his advice on how to choose the poems for a poetry manuscript.

Pick Out Your Favorite Child to Carry the Family Crest. (Part 03 of 04):

If you already have a theme for your manuscript, you won’t need to do this part. If you’re still learning the art of theme catching, just remember this is not as hard as it seems. The process involves relaxing, reading other books, watching movies, television, and listening to music, all while pretending your theme quest is not on your mind. That all the poems aren’t swirling in your head demanding your attention.

This method is time consuming and may test your ability to meditate, absorb input from other books and mediums, and to not strangle anyone while you hunt down the lightning bolt of inspiration. When you find your theme it will feel like it was there all along, but also like you were prodding snakes until the right one bit you. Pick out the poem you consider your favorite child. Keep in mind, this is a process. It doesn’t have to happen in one day. You are allowed to change your mind as often as you want. One minute, it’s the poem about the assassin rabbit with a heart of gold; the next, it’s the poem about the wheelbarrow running for president of Mexico. Let your mind float and muse. Have some wine. Listen to music. Watch a show or two. Each time you choose a favorite, read it several times, feeling the flow, taking in the subject matter, the small hills and valleys, the peaks. Absorb every theme about this poem that fascinates you; even the ones you didn’t know were there.

In parts 1 and 2 of this series (Link to Part 1, Link to Part 2), we discussed in depth the four categories of poems collected for manuscript assembly.

Poems you love
Poems you like
Poems you don’t like
Poems you kind of like, but they need work

Select all the poems from the first three categories that work thematically with this favorite poem. If you’re lucky, there will be a lot of poems that fit this theme. If not, you can loosely define the theme you got from the poem you chose and try again. Find the tangential relationships. Find those that are the antithesis of the theme. If this theme doesn’t work, pick another theme. Go back and forth. Go back and forth a million times. Open another bottle of wine. Go away and come back. Do the dishes. See a movie. This might be a good time to remember you were supposed to be at work an hour ago and go there. But don’t despair. Unless you wrote the poems with a theme in mind, this is supposed to be difficult and time consuming.

Breathe and let it be so. You spent years writing these poems, raising these children. Don’t dress them in rags before sending them to school.

When the theme is right, you will feel it. That you have hit on something. Once you have a theme, and that theme allows you to have enough poem, or close to enough, to complete the manuscript, go with it. Call it a manuscript. Every day, every time you mention it, call it my manuscript.
Own this step of the process.

Collect all the poems (still, not the 4th category yet) that match the theme and be sure to jettison the ones that don’t. Trust your instincts. As long as the poem doesn’t stick out as obviously not belonging to your theme, publishers are willing to give you the benefit of the doubt that it does. Trust goes a long way. Once you earn it with the publisher, they will stick with you.

Trusting your instincts works both ways. If you put a poem in the manuscript that clearly has nothing to do with the theme, no matter how good that poem is, you lose the trust you desperately need. In addition, 9 times out of 10, you lose the publication. Have I said this enough?

Now, take the manuscript for a spin. Literally. Print it and take it with you wherever you go. Read it anywhere except your home or office. See how you feel about it in different locales. Got to a coffee shop, or other place where you might read it, and see how it sounds in your head.

Doubt will creep in. After all, you are your hardest critic. You have to separate self-doubt from your critical eye. Notice, at no time have I invited someone else to look at the manuscript. This omission is not an oversight. It’s hard enough handling your own fears, much less the criticism of someone who hasn’t been there for the whole ride.

Side Note: If you have some people you trust, who understand how you think and what you are going for, by all means have them work with you from the beginning. Whatever floats your boat. But, in this case, shut them out from the initial read. If you’ve written enough poems for a manuscript, you have probably had enough well-meaning advice along the way. It’s now time to push yourself out of the nest and fly. Once the manuscript is all together and meets your standards, you can solicit criticism. But not in the middle. Too many cooks and all that jazz.

If you invite several people to look, have them respond separately and read their comments collectively. Some or most of their comments will be crap. Personal tastes, how they might have done it, etc. However, if most of them have the same feedback, you might want to rethink.

NEVER answer their questions, their inquiries. Comments are for you to gauge your manuscript, not for them to get answers. Let them know up front that this is how it will be. Nothing saps your creative energy and confidence more than having to explain “what you were after” to someone who may not get it anyway. If they are not comfortable with the feedback being for your benefit, make sure you never choose them again.

Good luck. Friendships can rise and fall on this stage.

It is time for to address the pesky 4th category. Here’s the deal with poems that need work: if it fits the theme, work on it. If not, no matter how good you think it might be one day, this is NOT that day. You’re putting together a cohesive manuscript. You are expending a lot of energy. Make a conscious effort to stay on track. Don’t try to rework poems that don’t fit and need work. This is not the time. As with the poems you didn’t like (for the right reasons), put them away to prevent temptation.

When revising your selected poems, you may find the job is much easier now. Once a theme is chosen, the places where these poems are broken will probably leap out at you. Give yourself no more than one day on each of these reworks. If it doesn’t shape up, ship it out.

And that’s it. You have a poetry manuscript. Except:
We haven’t talked order or title or number of pages or table of contents or acknowledgments or who you are going to piss off by leaving them out of the dedications page.

Up next: Dressing Up Your Children and Sending Them Out Into the World.

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Where Chaos Muppets and Order Muppets Meet: A Poetic Manifesto by Jessica Piazza, this year's Conference Poet

7/18/2016

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Jessica Piazza is the author of the two full-length poetry collections from Red Hen Press -- Interrobang (which won the A Room of One's Own Foundation To the Lighthouse Poetry Prize and the Balcones Prize for Poetry) -- and Obliterations (co-written with Heather Aimee O'Neill), as well as the chapbook This is not a sky (Black Lawrence Press). Jessica curates the Poetry Has Value blog, where she and others explore the intersection of poetry, money, and worth. Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, she now teaches Writing & Rhetoric at the University of Southern California, where she received a Ph.D. in English Literature and Creative Writing. Learn more at www.jessicapiazza.com and
www.poetryhasvalue.com.

Before you go any further, please read this article on Muppet Theory by Dahlia Lithwick. Yes, you heard me. Muppet Theory. A brilliant piece of sociological philosophy, if you ask me:

http://www.slate.com

Okay. So you now understand that you’re either a Chaos Muppet or an Order Muppet. Or you’re desperately trying to figure out which one you are. It doesn’t matter, really, because we’re taking this train to the next stop anyway. We’re going to apply this theory to poetry.

We’ll start simply. Language poets are probably Chaos Muppets. New Formalists are maybe Order Muppets. (Many of you will disagree, but I don’t care. Despite my groomed eyebrows and general love of whimsy, I share the article author’s personal classification: Faux Chaos Muppet. In other words, I like to categorize. Disagree away.)

Each of us, in our writing, probably leans toward one pole of muppetry or another, and this is natural and right and good.

But, maybe it doesn’t make the best poetry.

Let me explain.

According to Ovid, "All things human hang by a slender thread; and that which seemed to stand strong suddenly falls and sinks in ruins.” As perfect (if perhaps cynical) a synopsis of the human condition this is, it’s an even better description of the kind of writing that gets me excited.

My favorite poems live in that exact realm of humanity: illuminating both the strength AND the ruin that we all necessarily embody. One might consider those kinds of pieces, then, representations of Ovid’s slender thread. Or, even better, maybe they are those ideal Muppet Marriages Dahlia Lithwick describes so well in the Muppet Theory article. The place where the Chaos Muppet and the Order Muppet meet.

You see, this kind of writing treads the thin division between that which can guide us and that which can break us. And poems that attempt to walk such a potentially threadbare line can never be calm—they are born of nervous hands, insecure egos, born of the self-doubt that comes from trying desperately to be strong while ultimately falling into various forms of demise (mental, physical, situational or emotional.) Chaos Muppet to the extreme.

On the page, the neurosis can show up in so many ways. Attempts to codify the sound of language without its meaning, like Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons. Fragments, whether phrasal the way Apollinaire did them or even through disjunctive sentences the way Lyn Hejinian does. The whirlwind, endless, and changing narrative, like Richard Siken perfected. Poetry of accumulation, like Paul Guest’s. These, to me, scream Chaos Muppet, in the very, very best way.

However, in order to function successfully at all textually, these poems and the best like them combat this nervousness of subject through a poetics focused at least somewhat on order. The order might not be obvious even to the reader, but most of them have systems, and the existence of those systems saves the poems from being rants or jibberish. (Rants and jibberish are great. Seriously. I think that. I just think they’re one thing, and I’m talking about another thing. )

Just like chaos, poetic order comes in many packages: The regular, iambic rhythm of a perfect Alexander Pope poem. The free verse piece that strives for some visual or recognizable regularity, like William Carlos William’s triadic verse poems. End rhymes. Regular line-lengths. Even the desire for stanzas of the same number of lines belies the quest for Order Muppetry that so much traditional and contemporary poetry embodies.

And there it is. Louise Glück wrote “In the broken thing…human agency is oddly implied: breakage, whatever its cause, is the dark complement to the act of making; the one implies the other.” In both the order and the breaking of order, poems receive their breath. The making is the order and the breaking is the chaos. Together, they are sublime.

In my own poems, and on the most oblique level, I’m trying for a manifestation of the struggle between wholeness and breaking in a few ways. My poems are always about tension – and they find a voice for their tension in the clash between meter and internal rhymes. Through an incessant (some have said bullying...I prefer unyielding) use of repetitive metrical structures, rhyme and alliteration.

Forms and metrical structures themselves embody order. (I’m a bit of a sonnetphile and a prosody nerd, myself. Order, order, order! Rules, rules, rules!) But when I combine the gallop of the iamb with consistent (and insistent!) internal rhymes, alliteration, sound parallels and sound turns, it takes this formal music and adds an entirely new music right on top of it. And we all know what happens when you play two very different songs at once. No matter how ordered each might be on its own, the two layered are sheer sound chaos.

I personally hope this juxtaposition produces a sound that evokes the pulse of obsession. Obsession, to me, is a great manifestation of this marriage of order and chaos. Obsession is orderly in that it is one-directional, dogged, predictable. It’s also chaotic in that it’s volatile, unrelenting and emotionally tumultuous. In that way, my own search for a Muppet Marriage lives in the sound landscapes of my poems. Clock ticks that never relent. A tell-tale heart beating beneath the floor of the poems. An order that only barely contains the chaos.

Now, as you might already be screaming into the dumb light of your device’s screen, D.H. Lawrence basically already said this. Not the muppet part, of course, but the gist of its application to poetry. In fact, he pretty much posits that poets themselves, regardless of form and structure and content, are always demonstrating a search for this Muppet Marriage.

Poets, he writes: “reveal the inward desire of mankind. What do they reveal? They show the desire for chaos, and the fear of chaos. The desire for chaos is the breath of their poetry. The fear of chaos is in their parade of forms and techniques.”

So, this isn’t particularly new.

But I do think it’s a useful exercise for poets to figure out where their poems fall on the Muppet Theory scale, and how they might use craft tools to inject a little of the opposite approach into their work. Teaching craft tools that feel out of the box to my students is a core philosophy of my creative writing pedagogy, and though I never exactly realized I was trying to play match-maker to poetic Muppet Marriages, I suppose that’s what I do. And I’m pretty happy with the results.

Jessica Piazza

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Ingram Spark vs. BookBaby vs. Createspace

6/29/2016

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Shirin Yim Bridges has made the successful transition from Ezra Jack Keats Award-winning author (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, HarperCollins, Chronicle Books) to award-winning editor and publisher. In addition to being the Head Goose of Goosebottom Books, Shirin is currently editing several middle grade and YA novels, and consulting on the development of several more. She is unusual in knowing first-hand the writers’ aspirations and the labyrinthian realities of the book publishing industry. Shirin brings this valuable dual perspective to her teaching and mentoring, helping authors best negotiate their chosen course. She has given workshops and seminars on writing and publishing for Stanford University, the University of Washington, San Francisco State University, Illinois State University, the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators, the NSW Writers’ Center, the San Francisco and Berkeley Writing Salons, Write On The Sound, the California Writers Club, and the Left Coast Writers among many others, and is available for one-on-one consultancy.

I was recently asked for the pros and cons of Ingram Spark vs.BookBaby. The answer, I quickly realized, is a complex one, greatly dependent on the particular publishing goals for the book. I also thought that in any decision tree, Amazon’s CreateSpace would have to rate a mention. So what follows is my attempt to delineate the decision tree I would adopt in choosing between these three services, à la Decisions, Decisions; Self-Publishing a Children’s Book, which many of you appreciated.

1. How important are bookstores to your sales strategy?
If NOT VERY, skip to 4.
  If VERY, keep reading.

Let’s start out with a reality check. Self-published authors will find it almost impossible to get wide distribution in bookstores. Period. The reasons are legion but boil down to two words: workload andrisk. Most self-published authors aren’t represented by distributors that bookstores are already doing business with, and there’s little incentive to slog through the paperwork to set up a new account or to take your books on consignment and handle you outside the system. Also, as a book buyer, you have thousands of titles per season from the top publishers and distributors to contend with. You don’t have the time to read many samples. Why gamble that this self-published author has taken the pains and expense to ensure a professional-standard book when you can choose from thousands of titles that have been vetted by professional editors, designers, and copyeditors?

But with this caveat front and center, bookstores might be a valid cornerstone of some self-publishers’ sales strategies. A good example would be if you have a book with a very specific market that can be reached through very specific bookstores. Take Katy Pye‘s Tracking the Flash: My Lighthouse Travel Log. Where would you sell that? Gift shops attached to lighthouses, or bookstores in the neighboring towns. If you’re a buyer in one of those stores, are you so swamped with lighthouse books that you don’t have the time to look at a self-published title? Probably not. You’d probably at least take a peek at something so specifically lighthouse-y.

You may also decide for emotional reasons that getting into bookstores is important to you. It’s perfectly valid to feel that if you’re going to go to all this trouble to write, fund, and publish a book, you’re going to enjoy a book launch party and the pride of having your book on shelf in your local bookstore(s). Depending on your relationship(s) with your local bookstore(s), this might be a real possibility and may even lead to a reasonable number of sales. Amanda Conran, for example, was guaranteed a launch party at Book Passage in Corte Madera, for the excellent reason that she works there. She sold around 120 copies of The Lost Celt on her big day. That’s about half the total sales of most self-published titles, if you believe what you can google, which is that the average self-published book sells fewer than 250 copies in a lifetime. This number shows up everywhere, most respectably in Forbes, but the original source is never given, so imbibe this factoid at your own risk.

In any case, if for either of the reasons above you decide that bookstore sales are important to you, then I would drop CreateSpace right off the bat. Most independent bookstores will not knowingly take a CreateSpace book. They hate Amazon that much, and Amazon doesn’t help out by playing ball either: CreateSpace offers roughly half the discount (read profit margin) that bookstores are used to getting from other distributors and publishers.

Ingram, on the other hand, already has a relationship with just about every bookstore in the USA and an established (and accepted) discount schedule. Within the industry,
Lightning Source, Ingram’s original print-on-demand offering, was thought to provide much better production quality than CreateSpace—better color handling, more trim sizes, fewer typographic anomalies, etc. Spark has probably inherited some of this perception as a halo effect, even though its production process is different. (Lightning Source accepts printer-ready PDFs, forcing someone to pay attention to typography—or so one would hope; Spark, like CreateSpace, uses a “meat grinder”—an automatic formatting system that, in CreateSpace’s past, at least, was prone to errors.)

The Amazon stigma, if you’re targeting bookstores, is a compelling argument for favoring Ingram Spark. But how do you choose between Spark and BookBaby?

2. Do you want someone to produce your book for you?
  If you want help, keep reading.
  If you think you can do it yourself, skip to 3.

As Ingram wholesales for other book producers, you can benefit from Ingram’s bookstore relationships without producing your book with Ingram. BookBaby is a popular option.

When authors gush about their experiences with BookBaby, and quite a few of them do, it’s usually because BookBaby makes everything so easy. You pay them; they take care of it. Then, once your books are produced and in all the promised sales channels, they are out of the picture. No ongoing royalties, etc. It’s a straight “for fee” service.

They are credited with an excellent support staff who actually answer the phone. They provide easy, one-shop access to professional book designers and editors. (BARNT BARNT, that’s my alarm system blaring: for a professional-quality book, you need both of these services!) If I wasn’t a publisher myself and didn’t have easy access to designers and editors, etc., I’d probably consider using BookBaby.

3. Do you think you can produce a book yourself?
On the other hand, some self-publishers don’t need BookBaby’s menu of services. Some are already working with editors. I’ve been retained by a few of them, and these clients are a determined bunch who want to be more than authors—they want control of the entire publication process. (I actually brought one an invitation to submit from a traditional publisher, and he turned it down because he wanted to retain all creative control.) They want to pick their own illustrators and/or designers and have control of the cover art. They relish the challenge of marketing. They are digitally adept enough to deal with the meat grinders without suffering dangerous spikes in blood pressure. If you have your stable of professionals in hand and don’t need much additional production help, Ingram Spark is the most direct route into the Ingram database. As Ingram is America’s largest book wholesaler, that’s the catalog most independent bookstores will use when placing an order.

Be very clear that Ingram Spark, BookBaby, and nearly all similar services offer production, fulfillment, and easy ordering of your books, but although they use the word “distribution,” they are not full-service distributors. Industry distributors like Perseus and Independent Publishers Group have sales forces. In theory at least, their sales reps will go out there and plug your book. (In reality, their sales forces have thousands of books they can plug; they will plug what they think they can sell.)

Ingram and BookBaby, et al., do not offer sales services. They do not sell to the trade. YOU have to do the work to get a bookstore to place an order. Although you will be in the Ingram database, that database during any given season includes thousands upon thousands of titles, so unless the bookstore is actively looking for it, your book will not be found.

4. Are you primarily interested in online sales?
Unless you have a very specific target or excellent bookstore relationships (count celebrity or royalty as instant excellent bookstore relationships), most self-publishers will rely primarily on online sales. This is not disabling: independent bookstores now account for less than 10% of all book sales, according to a 2014 article in Forbes. If your intent is to go online-only, the choice comes down to Amazon vs. someone like BookBaby.

BookBaby’s advantages were covered in #2 and they apply whether or not you’re interested in bookstores. Your title will sit in Ingram’s catalog, just in case pigs fly and a bookstore wants to order your book without any prompting; but for the rest, BookBaby will take care of production of the print-on-demand (POD) book and conversion of the e-book, and usher both into the appropriate retail channels, dominated by Amazon for POD, and Kindle for e-books. They’ll charge you a fee for their services, and then you will take all profits minus the cut to your retailers.

Amazon is a little trickier in that not only do you have to handle print book production yourself, you have to handle ebook production also. Even if you are not intimidated by this, there will still be two separate Amazon companies with their own procedures that you’ll have to deal with: CreateSpace for the POD book; and Kindle for the e-book. If you would like your e-book available for every device, you will also have to convert your book into multiple e-book formats and distribute them separately to non-Kindle platforms like iBooks and Kobo.

One plus of persevering and tackling CreateSpace and Kindle yourself is that you can take advantage of Kindle's Select program. This gives you higher royalties and various marketing perks in exchange for a period of exclusivity—at a minimum, 90 days. Another advantage is that your POD books are directly in the Amazon system. You don’t have to ship books to them; they print them right off their own printers. But one of the most compelling reasons to consider the CreateSpace + Kindle bundle is profit. By not paying the likes of BookBaby, you can invest less in the production of your book. (Although, repeat repeat: I would really urge you to pay for a book designer for the cover, a professional editor, and ideally a separate copy editor—so any apparent savings may be a false economy.) CreateSpace is also thought to generally offer lower per-book prices than Ingram Spark, although costs vary with page count and format. When you get into the publishing business, you will be bowled over by how thin the margins are, so any penny saved is a penny earned.

OK, at this point I’m not sure if I’ve bored or depressed you into a stupor or confused you with all the branches of my decision tree, so I’m going to close with one last question:

5. Do you really have to choose between them?
Going back to the original question of whom I would choose, BookBaby or Ingram Spark, and having introduced Amazon as a third candidate myself, here is what I would try if I were a self-publisher with a commercial fiction novel. If, say, I had a romance, or a piece of sci-fi, or a mystery—all genres that do well digitally—and I were a first-time publisher with few professional contacts, I would:

Go to BookBaby and have them help me with design and editing, because, as I hope I’ve made abundantly clear, both are necessary to give your work its best shot, and unless you are yourself from an affiliated field, you might not know what good design and editing is. BookBaby not only gives you access to those services, but their suppliers have been vetted, and from what I can see, BookBaby knows a thing or two about professionalism and design, so “better than nought” as they say in northern England (pronouncing the “nought” as “nowt”).
Have them distribute my POD book, including to Amazon and Ingram. I’ll get the world’s largest online retailer, and the world’s largest bricks-and-mortar wholesaler as sales channels—recognizing that the responsibility for sales (pushing consumers to those channels) falls 100% on me.
Order 100 (more if you’re really brave) print copies and sell them hard to friends and family. Take sample copies into all the independent bookstores within a 50-mile radius (my personal definition of “local”) and try to negotiate consignment deals. Do the math carefully here because you should expect to give away a commission of at least 40%. That may leave you with little profit.
At the very least, negotiate a book launch party with the best independent bookstore within that radius. Work very, very hard at bringing my own crowd, knowing that I will get exactly three members of the public who happened to wander in.
Have lots of photos taken signing books. This is your author’s moment, and most self-published authors will look back and realize they spent a few thousand dollars on it, so suck as much joy out of this marrow as you can.
Have BookBaby hold off on distributing my e-book, but have them hand me a Kindle-ready mobi file.
Go to Kindle Direct Publishing and sign a 90-day exclusivity deal for my e-book to access the Kindle Select program benefits. Make the most of those benefits while I can.
Cancel my Select privileges and revert to a standard Kindle Direct Publishing account once the first 90 days are up.
Go back to BookBaby and ask them to now take the hold off and distribute my e-book to all their e-book channels, other than Amazon.

If you follow this strategy and all goes well, you will have Ingram and Amazon as sales channels, a reasonably professional product with the minimum of head- and heartache, a book launch party so you’ll at least have proud moments and happy memories, direct and consignment sales, the advantages of Kindle Select for your critical three months at launch, and distribution into most other e-book channels after the exclusivity period. I know that BookBaby will hold off on e-book distribution for three months; their reputation for answering their phone and being accommodating held up on personal inspection. And also, I want you to notice one thing: this strategy, if successful, might maximize your chances and even deliver personal satisfaction (a good launch party, as Amanda Conran enthused, is “everything I dreamed of, and more”) but it may not deliver you sales.

Sales is the unicorn. I’ve only ever heard one person in publishing say they know how to ensure it. Not any publisher, nor any editor either. Only one person: James Patterson. For what he has to say, go here. You will have to pay, but that should not surprise you.

Hope this helps!

For more on the publishing game, join me at the Mendocino Coast Writers Conference for a one-day Publishing Bootcamp. Or pick my brain while on retreat—I have one space left for my Oct 6-9 Port Orchard writers’ retreat, co-hosted by author and writing coach, Sheila Bender, and five spots open for Oct 9-12. Email me at shirin.bridges@goosebottombooks.com if you’re interested.

In the meantime, enjoy the first days of summer and happy writing!

Shirin

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Are There Any Other Questions?

6/9/2016

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LES STANDIFORD is founding director of the Creative Writing Program at Florida International University in Miami. He is the author of 23 books and novels, including the John Deal thriller series and the recent Water to the Angels: William Mulholland, His Monumental Aqueduct, & the Rise of Los Angeles. He will be teaching a master class and lecturing at the Mendocino Coast Writers Conference, Aug. 4-6.

How to conduct a Q&A following a book talk:
AT THE HISTORY JUNKYARD

I was giving a talk the other day when a man raised his hand. “How do you do your research?” He wanted to know.

I thought it was a much better question than, “Where do you get your ideas,” so I asked him a question back. “Do you have time for a story?”

“Sure,” he said. I gave it to him.

I got to the History Junkyard early. It’s a little out of the way, but sometimes there’s a crowd. it’s always best to get there before the heat builds up. There’s a kind of musty smell that hovers over the place, same as in an old bookstore or a wet library they’ve been meaning to tear down.

A fat guy in a t-shirt with a university seal stamped on the chest came out of the guard shack. The shirt was faded and had so many holes you couldn’t tell where it was from. He was wearing one of those tasseled velveteen tams like the European academics do.

“You here to pick?” he said, jerking his thumb at the sign nailed to the shack: HISTORY U-PICK, $2.75.

I gave him three ones and he came up with a quarter. “I gotta tell you, pal, there’s not much left. I hope you’re not looking for anything on race relations or sexual politics.”

“That’s okay,” I said. “But I appreciate the tip.”

Once you’re past the gates you can see how much stuff is actually in there. Mounds and mounds of it, rusting and creaking, big trunks, old chassis, mounds of glass, most of it broken, who knows what all, piled up higher than a man might reach, as the poets like to say.

You find the aisle you want and just walk right in, like going down some winding lane in a medieval city. French is right up front. Italian’s further down. Thousand Island is at the end.

I went down American, like I always do. There were a couple of guys already in there—a Brit and a Yank—tugging on either end of a broken oar from a Titanic lifeboat, arguing over the proper provenance of the thing. I had to step around them, but they never noticed I was there.

Further down, there were two guys in long black robes—one trimmed in green, the other in gold—swinging lug wrenches at each other. One guy had what he said was a page from Hemingway’s lost manuscript. The other guy said he saw it first. He clipped the first guy behind the ear with his wrench, snatched the sheet and ran. Even from a distance I could see it was just a page from the menu at Sloppy Joe’s, the phony one on Duval.

I finally got to the place I’d come for and I kept going back, almost every day, for a long time. You wouldn’t believe some of the stuff that goes on in the Yard, the things people say to each other, what happens when somebody drops the soap. I just kept my head down and minded my own business, because that is what you should do there, just like in the joint.

I ran across that page from the Hemingway, incidentally, but it wasn’t the reason I had come, so I put it back where I found it. It wasn’t very good. Makes sense. If he’d wanted anyone to see it he’d have left it out in plain sight.

Two years went by, maybe more, then I came out past the guard shack at the end of a day, at the wheel of a ’30 Dusenberg J model. The engine purred, and the nickel work glinted in the dying sun. You’ll never guess who it once belonged to, how he got the car, or how he lost it.

The fat guy was standing by the guard shack and gave a low whistle. “Damn,” he said. “I didn’t know that was back there.”

“It wasn’t,” I said. “I had to find the parts, then put it together. It took a while.”

“Right,” he said. “But look what you got.”

There was a rail-thin woman dressed in black standing beside him. Her mascara was smeared, and I could tell she’d been crying. “My academic department’s been combined with Entrepreneurial Relations,” she said to the fat guy. “Do you have anything on Donald Trump?”

He put his arm around her and began to talk in a comforting voice. I felt for her, but I knew it was therapy going nowhere.

I put my foot back on the accelerator and pressed. There were people waiting for the car.

Are there any other questions?

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