Brave New World

I think the next generation has such different attitudes - toward almost everything - that many hard fought social issues will evaporate or morph over the next 20 years. I remember seeing several gay activists interviewed after Proposition 8 passed saying - 'if we have to, we will wait for the generation that stopped us to die.' When I was born, segregation still existed and intermarriage was illegal in a number of states - now there is a casual acceptance of interracial relationships (well at least on TV and the streets of NYC, I don't know how things are in Smalltown, USA).

And here's the shock of shocks - the NEA announced a few days ago that Americans are reading more fiction! Commentators have attributed a lot of rise in reading to the popularity of Harry Potter and Twilight, the kind of fantasy that also got us ostracized in our youth. (I remember frequenting small shops in Pittsburgh which carried used fantasy and science fiction magazines in dark corners - it occurs to me now to wonder, in my enlightened adulthood, if there wasn't pornography somewhere in brown paper covers in those shops, keeping them alive.)

So all hail to the next generation, out there reading gay-themed YA and large quantities of fantasy and science fiction, scooping up graphic novels, improving their reflexes and speeding up their synapses with video games, apparently even dipping into the occasional book of poetry, and then Twittering away about all this to their friends. Keep reading. Keep Twittering. Keep dating (oh wait, I forgot, you don't "date") - well then, keep seeing whoever you like. It's kind of a cool world you're inventing, and I'm happy to be around to see it come into being.

Poetry: the most dismissed "genre"

I agree gay themes are a harder sell. Luckily in YA books there are a number of coming of age lesbian and gay narratives that do really well. Maybe librarians are just more open to ordering literature that will appeal to the diversity of teens that I see combing the shelves in our local library. From Jeanette Winterson's Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit to Boy Meets Boy by David Levithan, this niche within the healthy YA market is doing well and could use more authors... Ever consider this Bill? Boy Meets Boy presents a high-school that currently doesn't exist, where straight, bi, gay or lesbian is just an accepted part of things and the real drama is the choices the protagonists make as they struggle to grow up. Intersting. Sort of like The Cosby Show in the mid-80s presenting an upper-middle class black family where issues of race were covered but the Huxtable family wasn't victimized or trapped in a ghetto because of it. The show made a leap forward.

But don't get me started on how much poetry is dismissed as too small an audience or unprofitable. I called a bunch of old friends in the publishing world today. Editors I've met over the years and it being January I figured it was time to have lunch with as many of them as can spare me the time. Networking, gossip, the state of the publishing world, dogs and kids and what have you loved doing lately... Over and over in our brief chats they mentioned that this is a hard time to publish because nobody cares any more about awards and great reviews. All that counts is sales. Period. And if this applies to novels, there's no hope for the lowest on the heap, poetry. Sigh.

But wait, the really small presses are somehow keeping quality alive. They know it is about love of the content and the book as object. Maybe as publishers contract, fire people, close down, court more celebrity "written" novels and publish more sin-offs of movies, TV, and comics... maybe the small publishers will start to find more markets for the good things they print. Here's hoping. I just started doing design work for Benu Press, their inauguaral season, and they are publishing a book of poems about the civil rights movement in Milwaukee and a funny coming of age memoir by a gay author. So there ya go.

Year of Writing Faster

After reading Claudia's blog, I'm trying to decide if I want to write faster. I certainly don't want to write slower. But after so many years of writing, I think I've come to a kind of organic rhythm with my writing.

When I was younger, I was sure that given enough time, I could just sit down in the morning and write until dinner, with lunch and coffee breaks. This has never, ever, proven to be true, no matter how much time I had. Even when unemployed or underemployed, it just doesn't happen. I can, in fact, make myself sit down regularly and write - but rare indeed is the day when I can spend more than a couple of hours doing it.

I'm talking about really writing here - not sitting at my computer, checking my email, reading Salon, dropping in on the New York Times, seeing what's happening at Inked In and Linked In, trying to remember how to open my Facebook page - but really sitting down and focusing. I am sorry to say, I don't have that much focus in me. On a good day, I can write five pages. On a VERY good day, I might write seven or eight. A few times in my life, I've sat down and written a fifteen page short story, or ten pages of libretto, a whole scene, all in one day. But often, it will be one or two pages that comes out after a couple of hours of work, and I'll know, by the end of the day, that that's all that's emerging.

But I think I've learned to live with it. Although I still have my fantasy, that if I had a REALLY long time off, I'd get more writing done. I'm just not sure I believe it anymore.

Blocks and Blockades

I'm pretty sure your observation is correct, Bill - I bet it is a lot harder to get gay-themed work published. For one thing, this country surely hasn't fully embraced gay themes in life, let alone literature; for another, gay-themed work is probably perceived as a "niche" or even, heaven forfend, a "genre."

I know there are a lot of theories about why the world has become more compartmentalized over the last few decades (many of them centered on marketing), and it always seems sad to me that art and literature, which ought to be the shining beacon against such limitations, happily go along. These days, Jane Austen would be published with a pink cover in the chick lit section and Herman Melville's leviathan would be dripping blood from unwhale-like fangs over in action adventure. I think most editors of literary magazines would claim they were free from such considerations, but still, they have a reasonably firm concept of what "suits" their aesthetic - and I'm guessing that gay-themed work often doesn't. And don't get me wrong, I think the editors of literary magazines are heroes, and ought to be praised to the skies for all they do to keep short fiction and poetry alive - but like all of us, they live in a world with many unseen blockades, and we're all very used to those blockades, no matter how hard we try and see over and around them. Too often, the answer to those blockades is ghettos, and there are many, many ghettos for literature.

But I actually think the answer is to keep doing what you're doing. Your work is by its very nature not suited to compartmentalization, and I think if you keep writing about every aspect of life you know, you're at least helping to bring the blockades down brick by brick. Because the truth is no one, no matter how sheltered, actually lives behind those walls, even if just imaginatively, no matter how hard they try. And what we're trying to get at in our writing is some kind of truth, after all - the one that doesn't recognize those carefully constructed walls.

Gay? No Way?

Is it just my imagination--or bad luck--or is it much harder to get gay-themed material published than non-gay-themed material? In this day and age, I wouldn’t have thought so, but looking back over 2008, I can’t help thinking that this might still be the case. 

By any standards, I had a very successful year on the literary front--certainly the best year I’ve ever had. Five of my short stories were published. One of my short plays was published--and was nominated for the Pushcart Prize. One of my full-length plays was accepted by and presented at a play festival at the Cherry Lane Theatre, and another full-length play was runner-up for a national playwriting award. All good news, right? But when I look more closely at these works, I realize that NONE of them was gay-themed. (All right, the full-length play that was runner-up for a prize had a gay theme lurking in the background.) Meanwhile, my stories and plays in circulation this past year that DID have gay themes didn’t get anywhere. 

Coincidence--or nefarious forces at work?

TITLES

What makes a good title? I have no idea, but I’ve finally settled on a title for my new play that feels right.  This play was inspired by my trip to Mexico City and Teotihuacan last February, where I was struck by  the violent history of both sites—like most major world sites, for that matter—and by the way that different “clans” successively destroy their predecessors and appropriate their property and culture. I wondered what daily life might be like for people in these situations—and in particular what it might be like for gentler, artistic souls. This led to the idea of following one family as it evolved through history, somehow present at many conquests and migrations, right up to our current time and beyond. 

My first working title for this play was MIGRATIONS. My writers’ group felt this wasn’t descriptive enough--and a bit boring, too. It was also pointed out that what the family experiences even more than a series of migrations is a series of conquests, so the title became CONQUESTS AND MIGRATIONS.  This didn’t seem colorful enough to me, so then I tried THE CONQUERING RACE--but people felt this was too suggestive of the Nazis. Then I tried THE CONQUESTS OF IVOR AND IRENE, followed by IVOR THE WARRIOR.  Other possibilities included:

Survival of the Fittest

Ivor and Irene

The Conquests of Ivor and Irene 

Dwellings and Conquests

The Conquering Race

Conquering People

The Warrior Clan

The Evolution of a Warrior

The Warrior’s Family

The Warrior

The Warrior and His Family

The Evolution of Ivor and Irene

The Tale of Ivor and Irene

Ivor and Irene: An Evolution

The Need to Conquer

Groping Toward Survival

Groping Toward Evolution

Unnatural Selection

The Ascent of Man and Woman

Home is Where the Conquest Is

A Home is for the Taking

Conquering Scarsdale

Migrations of the Clan

I Take This Dwelling in the Name of Ivor and Irene

The Dwellings of Ivor and Irene

Where Ivor and Irene Dwell

Where We Dwell

A Dwelling is Not Necessarily a Home

I Take This Dwelling

Next Stop Scarsdale

Dwellings

Portrait of a Family

The Four Realms

Evolution of a Family

Evolution

Appropriation

Anthropology

Migrations of the Heart

Dwellings and Migrations

Occupations

This Dwelling is Occupied

But now the search is over. The new (and I hope final) title is...

THE BEST PLACE WE’VE EVER LIVED

A Fantasy in Two Acts and Four Realms

There’s more to family life than conquests and migrations.

 

The year of writing faster

I did have one huge good thing I did with my writing this year, I finished half a novel. In participating in NaNoWriMo (the month of November 50,000 words novel writing event) I finally realized I can pound out vast quantities of sentences and chapters. Remember, I'm a poet. We're talking a page of writing short lines with lots of spaces. After NaNoWriMo was over, I knew two things. I should have written it in first person and I'll need to throw a lot more misery and conflict in my hero's path. You just cannot be nice to your main character. There is no get-out-of-jail card in fiction if you want to keep things interesting. All those touching scenes and sweetness that I wrote, ugh, I was channeling some sort of Waltons rerun. Gack! I can't smooth things for my characters and behave like their stage mom. I am the supreme being, that is to say, the plot master. So I started researching just how someone coming of age in Brooklyn in 1912 would talk. I need my character to appear subservient but have a lively funny inner dialogue that will eventually be part of her overt character as she grows up. Oh yeah, one other thing I learned, when you write a lot, and really let it happen, some unexpected riffs happen. It is rather wonderful to give up the illusion of control and be rewarded for it.

I wish all of you, this coming year, a chance to write a galloping first draft of something, with no slowing down for quality or consistency. Write it fast. Rewrite it slow. Later, we'll workshop.

A Creative New Year

For reasons too sad and too numerous to go into, members of River Writers are no longer allowed to name years. When we were younger and more foolish, we used to name years things like, "The Year of Having Our Books Published," or, most catastrophically, "The Year of Getting Famous," and what would invariably follow were series of disasters which cost several further years to recover from. (The only exception was one year which Claudia and I entitled "The Year of Adventure," which included a really amazing reading by W.S. Merwin and a concert by Blossom Dearie - apparently if you leave years unspecific enough, and are nonhubristic, the Fates do not hound you in the same way.)

So I will not venture to title 2009, but I am nonetheless having a strong intuition that it is going to be a very good year for creative ventures. Sometimes you just know. 2008 seemed like a year for working things out - at least here at River Writers, we all seemed to be trying things out and stumbling up against some road blocks - not the most prolific year for even the most prolific among us. But I think things did get worked on and are at least beginning to be worked out, and I am now officially expecting Great Things in the New Year. Although we did end the Old Year with a really splendid draft of Bill's new play, which I do not yet believe has a final title, but is a brilliant meditation on changing roles within families over time. (Or if it does now have a final title, Bill, tell us!)

Although I don't believe any of us think of ourselves as particularly political artists or writers, I can't help wondering if the mood of the country over the last year has affected our writing and our mood more than we really have acknowledged, or at least discussed. Up until the very day of the election, gloom and anxiety were hard to avoid; and since the election, we all seem to be on hold, still hearing persistently dark news, but hoping at least, for the best. On the one hand, all the news fed to us seems to be bad; on the other hand, we have lived through several decades of unbelievably rapid change - social change, economic change, political change, and it seems like almost anything could happen, even a drastic change for the better.

But in any case, even more than most new years, I think this is definitely going to be a time for finishing old projects and beginning new ones. We won't label the new year, but I think we will begin it with ideas and energy, and hope that it's a time for going on to the next new thing.