The Slow Death of the American Author

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Scott Turow, president of The Authors Guild, has a fascinating, but depressing story in The New York Times regarding the rapidly changing publishing industry and the loss of revenue stream for authors, thanks in a large part to e-books and electronic search engines. Turow begins the article by stating authors have often been considered a fundamental part of democracy. He states:

“Authors practice one of the few professions directly protected in the Constitution, which instructs Congress ‘to promote the progress of Science and the useful Arts by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.’ The idea is that a diverse literary culture, created by authors whose livelihoods, and thus independence, can’t be threatened, is essential to democracy.

Turow points out, however, that the livelihood of authors is being threatened because revenue streams for writing and publishing are shrinking. Turow blames this partially on e-books, stating that e-books are inexpensive to produce and the major publishing houses “all rigidly insist on clauses limited e-book royalties to 25 percent of net receipts,” which is about half of a traditional hardcover royalty. He had that many best-selling authors have the power to negotiate a higher royalty, but lesser-known authors, or mid-list authors, don’t have such power.

The article goes on to address the fact that Google recently scanned thousands and thousands of pages of copyrighted material, and authors have made no money from their work when it appears in a search. Google claims that the whole text doesn’t appear, but Turow argues that if you continue using different search words, you can ultimately read the whole text. Google is making money off of this through ad revenue, but authors don’t see a dime.

Sadly, Turow doesn’t provide any remedy to this situation, such as simply supporting bookstores and purchasing books, even if it’s only an e-book.

New Poets’ Quarterly in Time for National Poetry Month

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For the last several months, I’ve been part of the Poets’ Quarterly team as a contributing editor, and I’ve had a blast. The new issue is live and features a lot of solid content, including an interesting essay about e-poetry, an interview with Jane Hirshfield, an interview with Molly Fisk, and several other reviews, essays, and interviews. For this issue, I worked on two reviews, including Looking for the Gulf Motel by Richard Blanco, who is slowly becoming one of my favorite contemporary American poets, and another review on A Change in the Weather by Geoffrey Jacques. I was exposed to this book during one of my Ph.D. classes at Binghamton University this semester. Jacques’ book makes the claim that the most well-known modernist writers, including Wallace Stevens, Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, and T.S. Eliot, owe a huge debt to black culture. The book came out a few years ago, and I am waiting for Jacques’ theories to spark greater debate, which is one reason I wanted to review the book. His ideas are worth considering because they challenge the modernist canon.

Check out the rest of the issue and enjoy it.

Jim Daniels Reading at Keystone College

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The string of literary events in NEPA continues. Poet/prose writer Jim Daniels will read at Keystone College this Thursday at 7 p.m. in Evans Hall. The reading is free and open to the public.  Since 1981, Daniels has been on the faculty of the creative writing program at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he is the Thomas Stockham Baker Professor of English. Daniels won the inaugural Brittingham Prize in Poetry from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He was educated at Alma College and Bowling Green State University.

Samples of Daniels’ work can be found using a simple Google search, but here is a link to his poem “Dim,” republished by The Poetry Foundation, and another link to his short story “Et Tu,” recently published by the journal PANK.

Shout-out to Two Open Mics

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For budding writers living in northeast, PA, there is a chance to share your work with a broader audience through two newish open mics in the area.  The first open mic I want to mention takes place the fourth Wednesday of every month at Library Express in the Steamtown Mall at Scranton. I used to host this, but my teaching schedule prevented me from continuing to do so. However, local poet Scott Thomas has stepped in and revived it, so make sure to check it out. The next one will be in April.

The other open mic I want to mention takes place the fourth Friday of each month at the Dietrich Theater in Tunkhannock. Unlike the Library Express open mic, this one also features music. Participants are encouraged to get there by 6:30 if you want to sign up for one of the open performance slots. They fill up fast! The series is run by Laurel Radzieski, a Keystone College alum who is currently working on her M.F.A. at Goddard. In June, I will be stepping in and hosting the series for one night, and I will be the featured poet July 26.

Plenty of opportunities are available in the area for young writers. Make sure to make use of them.

 

 

New Visions Reading

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The next installment of the reading series at New Visions is March 30 at 7 p.m. The line-up this month will feature a diverse mix of Keystone College alumni, Wilkes M.F.A. students/alumni, and other local authors. It will include poetry, fiction, and possibly some non-fiction. As always, this reading series if free and will be held at New Visions Studio and Gallery, 201 Vine Street in Scranton.

Stanton Hancock is a poet, author, and musician from Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley. Stanton has a Bachelor’s in Philosophy from Bloomsburg University and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Wilkes University. He is the founder of the indie publishing company Three Chord Press and is excitedly finishing the final preparations for its first release, Split 7 Inch, slated to be released this spring.

Laurel Radzieski is a Keystone College graduate who divides her time between writing and theatrical endeavors. She is the Cultural Assistant at the Dietrich Theater and is an acting member of the Dietrich Children’s Theatre, a group in which she has played a fox, a wolf, and a few cats. Her poetry has been recognized by the Mulberry Poets & Writers Association and she is currently pursuing an M.F.A. in Creative Writing at Goddard College.

Shelby Fisk is a former staff writer and photographer for The Times Leader Scranton Edition and Abington Journal. She graduated with a M.A. and MFA in Creative Writing from Wilkes University, where she studied fiction and poetry. She writes incorporating the two genres in her writing, teaches English at Keystone College, where she received her B.A., and is currently working on a multi-narrative novel.

Chris Campion holds an M.A. in Creative Writing from Wilkes University. His short stories can be found through Fiction365.com and the East Meets West, American Writers Journal. He is currently an M.F.A. candidate at Wilkes University.

Heather M. Davis has been a film buff since the beginning of her life on Earth. She received a B.A. in Film Studies and Production from Hofstra University and a M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Wilkes University. She works full-time as Marketing and Communications Specialist for Johnson College and adjuncts at Johnson College and Lackawanna College. She’s a screenwriter, essayist, and fiction conjurer who currently lives in Scranton.

Andrea McGuigan has been hosting poetry readings in the greater Scranton area for more than ten years, including the Test Pattern reading series, the Anthology Books reading series, and the current Prose in Pubs series. Andrea is a rostered artist-in-residence with the NEIU #19 and has taught poetry workshops and residencies in schools and at Arts Alive and Arts Alive Intermediate. She is a regular judge for Poetry Out Loud, a national performance poetry competition in which local schools participate. Her book of poems, Spinning with the Tornado, was published by Paper Kite Press in 2003. Once upon a time, she owned a bookstore called Anthology. Andrea lives in Scranton with her husband, Conor, and their cat, Kiki Ray Simone.

Post-AWP Rounup

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I spent the last few days in Boston for the AWP Conference. This was my third time attending; I previously went to the conference in Chicago in 2009 and Denver the following year. By far, this one was larger, and even the bitter winds and steady snowfall of the first two days didn’t keep people away. I heard estimates that ranged from 11,000-15,000 people registered and over 700 venders at the book fair. I questioned why AWP grows larger each year. Is it because of the proliferation of M.F.A. programs across the country? Is it because of the growth of small presses and journals? I would say it’s both. There’s a creative writing boom going on right now, especially with the continuous creation of low-res M.F.A. programs and undergrad B.F.A. programs. I see this even in northeastern, Pennsylvania. The Scranton/Wilkes-Barre area is not at all like Boston or other big cities, and yet there are several writing groups here and multiple reading series. The reading series are often well-attended, jammed even. I see this as only a positive thing.

During the three-day event, I saw several of my favorite contemporary poets, including Major Jackson, Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, Kevin Young, Tony Hoagland, Cornelius Eady, Thomas Sayer Ellis, Richard Blanco,Tracy K. Smith, Kevin Young, and others. During the Cave Canem event, Major Jackson read a poem about online dating that made me almost fall out of my chair laughing at certain points. It was a poem a lot different from anything found in his three full-length collection of poems, especially for its humor, but also the point it makes about consumerism, online dating, and making yourself a product for another’s consumption.

Hoagland was on a panel with Chris Campion and a few others, and he wrote an essay specifically for AWP about a theory he has regarding capitalism overtaking poetry. The thesis of his article is that the proliferation of M.F.A. programs and this increasing notion of a “professional writer” has created unhealthy competitiveness in the arts and writers more concerned with publishing than really creating good poems and building community. He blames this on market capitalism  and the notion that one must get a tenure-track position to write and have a career. Furthermore, he said this has led to over-intellectualization in poetry, or rather using big words just for the sake of using big words. Hoagland made plenty of good points, and his fellow panelists had a lot of responses, some defending the M.F.A. programs by stating they can indeed build community and they can teach young writers to focus on craft and reading. However, I found myself mostly agreeing with Hoagland. There are SO many M.F.A. programs out there now and SO many M.F.A. graduates vying for very, very few academic jobs.  This has indeed created a cutthroat aspect not at all healthy to community building. Yet, what does one do with an M.F.A.? Most programs stress teaching, but maybe it’s time to have a conversation about career alternatives, such as public relations work, editing, publishing, journalism, or teaching community workshops, as opposed to teaching in a college classroom.

During another panel, I listened to Charles Bernstein defend poetry as a political act when a fellow panelist claimed poetry should not at all be political and instead be about truth and beauty because a political poem makes no difference at all because “nobody reads poetry.” Bernstein said that poetry is inherently political because it often questions what is truth or beauty. He added that even the notion of publishing writing online and through small presses is political because it creates information sharing and makes literature available to more people for free or a low price.

Now that I’m back from the conference, I’m glad to be on spring break. I have a stack of new books to read, poems to revise, and new poems to draft.

 

 

 

The Impact of Sequestration Locally

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Because the U.S. Congress and White House were unable to reach a budget deal, President Obama had to sign off on sequestration, meaning numerous automatic spending cuts. This issue is basically a self-imposed crisis Congress created for itself when it couldn’t reach a long-term fiscal cliff deal in the last Congress. Perhaps Democrats were naive in thinking the GOP would never allow deep spending cuts to the Pentagon, but here we are, half a week after the sequestration deadline passed, and still no solution. The impact of sequestration will most likely be felt starting in the beginning of April. There will be longer lines at airports, since TSA funding will be slashed. There will be fewer flights, since there also be fewer air traffic controllers. Teachers will be laid off. States will lose federal funding for police and firefighters. And the list goes on.

The impact of sequestration is already being felt here in northeast, Pennsylvania. The Wilkes-Barre-based paper, The Citizens’ Voice, has a front page story today that Tobyhanna Army Depot, one of the largest employers in the region, is set to unveil $309 million in budget cuts, resulting in the furloughs of 5,136 civilian employees. According to the article, “Facility managers and the unions are working on the details of the furlough, in which the 5,136 employees will be required to take 22 non-consecutive furlough days between late April and Sept. 30 unless the federal budget impasse in Washington, D.C., is solved.”

What’s especially alarming is that Congress has more impending deadlines, including the debt ceiling. This week, House Speaker John Boehner said something needs to be done to ensure there is not one crisis after the other. However, I am skeptical he will get his Congress and its Tea Party wing to really pass a long-term plan that has the support of some Democrats and avoids another self-imposed crisis. This sequestration and the failure to resolve it has only increased tensions on the Hill.

Ironically, the stock market broke a record yesterday, as the Dow Jones soared to an all-time high. Since 2007, corporate profits have been skyrocketing, but job creation remains dismal and the unemployment rate remains stuck at 7.8-8 percent. Meanwhile, if this sequestration issue is not resolved, then middle and low-income workers will be hit the hardest, as evidenced by the article today in The Citizens’ Voice.

 

 

Salon Says There Is No Short Story Boom

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In reaction to a New York Times article stating there is a short story boom, thanks to digital technology and shortened attention spans, Salon published an article saying there is no boom. Laura Miller, the article’s author, notes that the only book mentioned in the Times article selling well is George Saunders’ The Tenth of December, and Miller attributes that to other factors, writing, “Saunders has built a devoted following over the past 17 years, hadn’t published a book in a good while and — most important of all — was heralded in the headline of a long, radiant profile in the New York Times Magazine as producing ‘the best book you’ll read this year.’ All of that could have happened 10, 20 or 30 years ago and produced the same result.”

Yet, the Times articles does not necessarily make the case that short story collections are selling well. (Really, how many books are selling well now-a-days?) The Times instead makes an argument that the Internet has made it easier to publish short story collections and has even given rise to some indie presses focused solely on short stories. Miller does, however, acknowledge that the advent of smartphones changed reading habits, but she wrongly states that the Times claimed smaller screens  have led to a resurgence in the short story. I’m not so sure that is what the Times  articulated but rather that reading habits are changing and the Internet has shortened attention spans. As a creative writing and literature teacher, I see this all the time. Trying to get students to read a novel, or even a long poem, is a challenge. Now I don’t have particular evidence that the Internet has fundamentally altered the brain and changed attention spans, but it does seem likely. The youngest generations have grown up with the Internet, with instant information, and with a culture of soundbites. They want entertainment easy to digest in a sitting or two.

Regardless,  the Times and Salon articles provide interesting debate about the place of the short story in contemporary society and whether or not it is undergoing a resurgence because of the Internet.

Resurgance of the Short Story

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Short story writers rejoice! No longer do you have to feel like your medium is the oddball cousin of the novel. According to this recent article by the New York Times, short stories are undergoing a resurgence, due to the Internet and our short attention spans. For a while, the short story market was tough. A lot of publishers didn’t want to release short story collections and instead focused on novels and memoirs. Even some journals shied away, due to a shortage of funds that made their page counts smaller and smaller, thus making micro fiction or poetry the preferred genre.

But all of that is changing, thanks to the Internet. Several well-known fiction authors have released short story collections recently, and the trend will continue. According to the article:

“Already, 2013 has yielded an unusually rich crop of short-story collections, including George Saunders’s Tenth of December, which arrived in January with a media splash normally reserved for Hollywood movies and moved quickly onto the best-seller lists. Tellingly, many of the current and forthcoming collections are not from authors like Mr. Saunders, who have always preferred short stories, but from best-selling novelists like Tom Perrotta, who are returning to the form.

Recent and imminent releases include Vampires in the Lemon Grove, by Karen Russell, whose 2011 novel, Swamplandia, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Damage Control, a first collection by Amber Dermont, whose novel The Starboard Sea was a best seller in 2012; and another first story collection, We Live in Water” by Jess Walter, just off his best-selling novel Beautiful Ruins (2012).”

While literary journals that have traditionally published short stories may be dwindling, the Internet has offered new publishing opportunities. For instance, Amazon created its Kindle Singles program a few years ago for publishing short fiction and nonfiction. The cost for the reader is cheap and authors get 70 percent of the royalities.  Meanwhile, some smaller Internet publishers, such as Byliner, are pushing short stories.

What the Times article proves is that the Internet is creating yet another change in the publishing world and making it more possible for short story writers to find a market. The article also notes that our attention spans are rapidly decreasing and we want work we can read in one sitting. Short stories, however, have long been around, and some of the most well-known fiction authors of the last century, including Hemingway, Carver, Cheever, and Nabokov, have written memorable short story collections. Now there is an emerging market for such a form.

Obama’s Re-Election and a New Voting Coalition

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The New York Times has a great article today about the politics of the under 30 generation. The overall thesis is that the politics of young people reflects a belief that government can solve problems and we do indeed need to continue funding programs like Medicare and Social Security. This is the anthesis of the conservation revolution of the 1980s that helped elect Ronald Reagan twice, followed by George Bush I and later George Bush II. It is also very much possible that this generation, much like the younger generation that supported Reagan, could reshape American politics in profound ways for years to come. Essentially, after seeing President Obama get re-elected twice and Democrats winning five out of the last six federal elections, we could be seeing the unraveling of the Reagan revolution and trickle down economics.

The article, titled “Young, Liberal and Open to Big Government,” focuses on college students in Montana. The setting is significant because Montana is considered a deep red state. However, the article notes that because of the under 30 generation, Montana elected two Democratic senators and a Democratic governor in the last few election cycles. This points to the influence that young folks can have at the ballot box, especially in off-year elections when senators, governors, and state legislators are on the ballot.

Throughout the article, the young people interviewed expressed a desire for a system of government more in line with FDR’s philosophies than Reagan’s. Sam Thompson, a 22-year-old college students, is quoted as stating that while he considers himself fiscally conservative, but he opposes cuts to Medicare and wants expanded healthcare coverage. Billie Loewen and Heather Jurva, editors of a student newspaper, state the under 30 generation has a Depression-era mentality. Panicked they won’t find good jobs, or will lose healthcare coverage once they turn 26, they believe government needs to play an active role in helping the economy. These quotes are backed up by a nonpartisan PEW Research Center poll from November that found under 30 voters are the only age group in which a majority said the government should to more to fix the nation’s problems.

This trend of young people voting for Democrats is not new. They’ve been casting more and more ballots for Dems since 2004; however, the under 30 crowd now composes a bigger slice of the electorate, 19 percent this most recent election, up from 18 percent in 2008. Furthermore, the millennial are the most ethnically and racially diverse crowd.

Republicans should be rattled by these figures. The Democrats, President Obama especially, have built a new coalition, the most diverse ever, that can win national elections even without a majority of the white vote. This will fundamentally alter U.S. politics, just as the Reagan revolution did. It will make it easier and easier for Dems to win elections.

What has yet to be seen, however, is whether or not the Democratic Party will truly reflect the views of its base. President Obama has faced a lot of criticism on the left for not doing more to fix the economy and not pushing greater FDR, New Deal-like policies during his first two years in office when his party had supermajorities in the House and Senate. What has changed, however, is the conversation regarding the tax system and fair economic policy. Recently, during the debt ceiling talks, the president got the GOP to cave on taxes and he secured a tax increase for top percent of income earners, certainly the opposite of the trickle down theory. Now he is pushing to close tax loopholes. However, the president still believes in some “grand bargain” to lower the debt, a bargain that will probably include cuts to social programs, the opposite of what a lot of his base wants.

The millenials  are also liberal on social issues, and it has yet to be seen what will be done regarding immigration and gay rights, though the president has vowed to push those issues hard during his second term.Immigration was one of the cornerstones of his recent inaguration speech, and it’s likely it will be pushed again tomorrow during his State of the Union address.  He can even use the power of executive order to pass some progressive laws, especially regarding gay rights and immigration.

What is clear is that this country is rapidly changing, and the shifting demographics will indeed play out at the local, state, and national level. There is a new coalition now, one that believes in a larger role for government, the opposite of austerity and trickle down economics.