Ten Reasons Why We Should Help St. Mark’s Bookshop Survive

Image from Project Neon

May 15, 2014 update: St Mark's Bookshop has signed a new lease on East 3rd Street, is contemplating non-profit status, and is less than $8,000 away from their moving money goal on Indiegogo: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/st-mark-s-bookshop-on-the-move

Original post, August 2012:

You may or may not have heard that indie St. Mark's Bookshop in New York is trying to raise funds to move to a cheaper space in their longtime neighborhood, the East Village. Currently, their landlord, Cooper Union, has given them a temporary (and slight) discount in their rent, but when it goes back up to the "normal" astronomical $20,000/month at the end of the year, the store fears they will be forced to close. Their campaign at Lucky Ant has been going strong but still needs your help with less than a week left to reach their all-or-nothing goal of $23,000. Specifically, they need to raise $7,000 in four days. Please consider donating.

Here's why I think it matters:

1. St. Mark's is a terrific bookstore with top-notch book buyers.

It’s hard for me to describe in a short space how much I admire this bookstore and its place in American letters, so I’m writing a whole book about it. I had the pleasure of working at St Mark’s Bookshop from 1997 to 2005, and I'm currently writing a memoir about my years there. You can find eleven installments of this book at Undie Press including my observations on which types of people shopped there (from book critics to New York poets to indie rock stars to out-of-town intellectuals to architects to DJs to academics to performance artists to filmmakers to expats to internationals) for what books (design, poetry, photography, cutting-edge fiction, cultural criticism, art porn, zines, queer theory, the latest lit or lifestyle magazines); which celebrities browsed there (like Susan Sontag, Thurston Moore, Richard Howard, DJ Spooky, Diamanda Galas, Harmony Korine, Jim Jarmusch); and what books meant to the people who worked at the shop. My opening chapter gives an overview of why I think St Mark's Bookshop deserves a permanent place in literary history.

2. St. Mark's Bookshop is not just a place that sells (and curates) culture and history. St. Mark's Bookshop IS living history.

As a bookstore, St. Mark's holds an institutional memory of major moments in alternative publishing history. The owners (and some longtime employees) both worked at 8th Street Books, which was the New York bookstore the Beats frequented and the New York bookstore that embraced the "paperback revolution." Both owners worked also at East Side Books, an East Village bookstore which was known as a place to find underground comics, mimeographed novels, and local political pamphlets—at a time when these were a major currency of the cultural revolutions and the avant garde. St. Mark's opened in the late '70s, making a place for artistic expressions to live and breathe alongside new areas of inquiry we take for granted today, such as sections with labels like "Vietnam Studies" or "Lesbian and Gay Studies."

Located in the center of the vibrant and bohemian East Village, the bookstore has long been a place that sells today's forefront thinkers (or poets, or photographers) to tomorrow's celebrated writers (artists, musicians, academics, etc). Writer/editor and former employee Ron Kolm has said, "I took a pay cut to work at St Mark’s Bookshop [in 1985] because I knew that the art scene in the East Village was in full bloom, and I knew that the fiction scene was about to explode, and I wanted to be a part of it." In my time, St. Mark's was known as the store in New York with the widest selection of zines, poetry, and literary magazines, not to mention all the anti-war underground newspapers that showed up circa early 2002. Now it’s the Occupied Wall Street Journal they're distributing, and their newish reading series has hosted such literary lights as Sarah Schulman, Kate Zambreno, Michael Moore, Eileen Myles, Laurie Weeks, Tao Lin, Marie Calloway, Giancarlo DiTrapano, Samuel R. Delaney, and Gary Indiana. Ever since its opening in 1977, the authors, customers, and clerks of St. Mark's have been involved in an easy and fertile conversation hosted by the bookstore. In every era of its existence, St. Mark's has had a keen eye for offering (and a knack for attracting) the cutting edge literature, art, and thought of its time—and the privilege of introducing such books to many of those very creators. To my eye, this store is a living legacy worth helping to survive another 35 years.

3. Give the store a level playing field: help St Mark's Bookshop move to a smaller space with reasonable rent.

People read about failing bookstores and they think the era of the bookstore is simply over. Progress has happened, the ebook has won. Not true. Many bookstores all over the country and all over the world are still thriving. The brick and mortar bookstore isn’t over—but the ones that survive this change in publishing (and this devastating recession) have to get smart, slim down. This campaign IS St. Mark’s getting smart. The fundraising campaign represents a series of business decisions—to use 21st century tools, starting with Lucky Ant (the Kickstarter-like platform hosting the fundraiser), proceeding to a re-vamp of their online presence (bookstores that survive often claim about 25% of sales online), and slimming down by seeking a smaller store with more reasonable rent. Soon their rent will go back up from (current "rent-reduction") $17,500 a month to $20K. Think YOU can move that much merchandise and still support several employees? When St. Mark's opened in 1977, their rent was $375 a month. Today's rent, as they say, is too damned high.

4. A level playing field means the bookstore can become self-sustaining doing what they do best: selling books.

You've heard about how well Strand and Book Court are doing? They own their own buildings. This is relatively rare among bookstores. When the great bookstores of 4th Avenue [once known as Book Row] started to close or move en masse in the 1960s, some booksellers lamented that they wished they had bought their building when given the chance. Translation: All bookstores, even the best ones, need an affordable situation to ride out times of change.

5. Even though Brooklyn is the hottest thing since sliced (artisanal, five-grain) bread, downtown Manhattan, home of St Mark's Bookshop, is still the place where people meet in the middle of surrounding locales (from Hoboken to the Upper West Side to Brooklyn and Queens)—as it has been since the Native Americans used it as a busy trading post.

6. This retail bookstore in the heart of the publishing capitol has done so much for the small presses.

I used to encourage editors of fledgling lit mags—"In the absence of getting a distributor, just get your magazine at St Mark’s Bookshop. If your magazine is quality, it will sell like hotcakes." To name just a few of the small presses and magazines I watched transition from "new and fragile" to "known and thriving" in part due to hefty sales at St Mark’s: Soft Skull Press, Melville House, Ugly Duckling Presse, McSweeney's, Ig Publishing, Akashic Press, and Archipelago Books. Other well-sold presses at the store included Semiotexte and Autonomedia, AK Press, Sun & Moon Press, Alice James Books, Exact Change Press, Wave Books, Calamari Press, Green Integer, Hanuman Press, Hanging Loose Press, Soho Press, Thunder's Mouth, New Directions, Shambala Press, City Lights, Dalkey Archive, Spuyten Duyvil, Seven Stories, Four Walls Eight Windows, Serpent's Tail, Coffeehouse Press, Seal Press, and so many more. Support the bookstore that supports the small press.

7. Don’t lament the passing of a great bookstore when you have a chance to help.

I have heard people "mourn" the bookstore already in that laziest of ways: "Another great New York institution is on its way out." Or, "Another great bookstore that can't stand up to Amazon." Curb the instinct, folks. The bookstore is not gone, it's not over, and there is still time to do something. Put your money behind your hope, not your dread. Donate here, in exchange for gift certificates, discounts, and tickets to the grand re-opening: http://www.luckyant.com/nyc/east-village/index.html

8. St. Mark’s Bookshop is neighborhood bookstore to the world.

I mean this in two directions: One, the world comes through New York and many stop into the store when they're in town, adding to the terrific mix of customers. And two, the East Village is "home" to every artist and bohemian who wants to claim it: The East Village is not just a place but a state of mind. To me, the East Village will always stand for art that takes exciting risks both in form and content; street-smart, nuance-wise, aesthetic-minded intellectualism; and a politics of the people. For 35 years, St Mark's Bookshop has curated a selection of books and materials that is aware of these three components of the neighborhood's proud output and hungry reading and culture needs. Think of them as an import/export service to and from an ever-replenishing source of the avant-garde. Thank them by donating here: http://www.luckyant.com/nyc/east-village/index.html

9. Be (part of) the subsidy that small businesses don't have.

Small businesses like St. Mark's Bookshop are thrown to the sharks of the "free market" while corporations like Amazon and Barnes & Noble receive tax breaks and strong-arm publishers into (unsustainable) massive discounts. "Non-profits" like Cooper Union also get tax breaks and other subsidies. Yet small businesses are the ones who hear, "Well, if you can't sell enough books to survive, then I guess the free market has spoken." Why doesn't anyone say to Amazon, "Awww, poor baby, can't survive selling books at retail price? Can't hack it asking people to work at a human pace and temperature? Can't make enough to pay your taxes? Boo hoo!" Amazon is a market bully. While brick and mortar bookstores gladly coexist with each other (St. Mark's has survived the arrival of indie McNally Jackson, and even two nearby Barnes & Nobles), Amazon is a predatory capitalist who needs its teeth removed before there's a fair fight to be found. As Sherman Alexie puts it, "Amazon is in the 1% and independent bookstores are in the 99%. So who are you going to fight for?” Fight for St Mark's now: http://www.luckyant.com/nyc/east-village/index.html

10. Aren't you sick of eulogies?

I’m still mourning the passing of the great literary humanists George Whitman (Shakespeare and Company, Paris) and Barney Rosset (Grove Press and Evergreen Review). Please don’t let St Mark’s Bookshop die, too. A girl can only take so much crushing news in one year.

*****

Please consider donating to help St Mark's Bookshop HERE [Updated May 15, 2014]: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/st-mark-s-bookshop-on-the-move

And please share this post on your social media sites: Twitter, Facebook, Tumbler, etc.

The Art of the Book Review: Barrett Warner

Today I’m talking about book reviews with poet and reviewer, Barrett Warner. This is the second in an interview series about the art, craft, and challenge of writing book reviews in today’s lit world, and you can read my earlier interview with fiction author and critic, Spencer Dew, here: The Art of the Book Review: Spencer Dew.

Barrett Warner is a writer I had the great pleasure to read with (at the Last Sunday, Last Rites series) when I traveled through Baltimore in late April. I loved what he and poet Jessica Dotson did to tweak the usual line-up of readers. Simply by reading their poems one at a time, alternating (an opaque call and response), they raised the energy level in the room to heights that the normal everyone’s-turn-at-bat would have missed.

Barrett wears a number of hats like most of us: he's a poet who leaves an impression wherever he goes (winner of the 2011 Princemere Poetry Prize and finalist for the 2012 Washington Writers' Publishing House book contest); author of the chapbook Til I’m Blue in the Face (Tropos Press); a horse breeder; and co-publisher with his wife, poet Julia Wendell, of the small press, Galileo Books. As a critic, he’s reviewed books for such publications as jmww, Loch Raven Review, and Rattle; and he has reviews forthcoming at Otis Nebula, Cerise Press, Shenandoah, Fiddleback, and Chattahoochee Review. He lives on a farm in Maryland's Gunpowder Watershed. Without further ado:

Karen: What do you see as the challenges particular to reviewing poetry?

Barrett: The word poetry feels so general. Not all language is verbal. My chargers know six words and a jockey chirp, but lordy, the stories they tell, the poems they sing.

Digging into a book of poems I wanted to be swept away. Falling in love is the easy part. Now it’s more about, OK, where are we going now? Will I need a toothbrush? Most poets are writing from experience rather than particular lyric traditions or “schools” (the Black Mountain School today sounds like the name of a fiddle band). How do you critique someone’s experience?

The biggest challenge is to know who you’re writing to. In the newspaper age you had an idea where the roll-ups were being tossed—houses, newsstands, etc. Online reviews reach an unfixed readership. I’ve got three lines to grab someone I’ve never met and could never describe; three lines to win them over into clicking the “see more” button.

For me, reading poetry is the same great sport it ever was. But talking about it, reviewing it, which is very old school, can be awkward. Having ideas—judging the art of a poem—feels so selfish. My main point in writing a review is that as I get older it’s harder for me to be moved but when I am moved I definitely want the whole world to know about it.

One problem I have—editors want you to discover Mozart’s next Requiem, and to write about it in 500 words. This is Mozart we’re talking about! Try 10,000 words. I mean, it’s online so we’re not offing trees. The cost of paper is not an issue. I need 1,100 to 1,400 words to make a review.

In terms of the poems themselves, I’m troubled by line edits. It’s so much easier and cheaper to lay-out and print a book since it doesn’t have to be off-set anymore. Editors used to do a much better job combing manuscripts, fussing over text. I’ve seen a lot of great poems which still would have benefited from a better word here or there but no one seems to know whose department that is.

Personally, I’m someone who needs aggressive editing. I was forty-eight by the time I learned how to spell bougainvillea, not to mention my affection for confusing rhetoric. Often I’ll write a review and forget to say whether or not I liked a book. I rely strongly on editors who are probably very busy to help me nevertheless, to remind me of the basics. Many of my first drafts of a review need a twenty minute shower. So I couldn’t really work without lots of editing and I sort of wish more poets felt the same way.

Karen: What is it you DO when you review a book?

Barrett: In 1988 my buddy Josh, Christ how he got pissed at me—we were always playing 500 miles. He made up the game or it was in one of his short stories. You know, “500 miles to Georgia tell me what you see.” It was an imaginary contest for who could see the most. We played it out loud, probably to impress someone named Alison. Boys, she’d smirk. She wore contempt like an orchid.

Every book feels like that 500 mile trip only now it’s real. I read a book of poetry as if I’m on a train. That cattle catcher on the engine car is getting bruises. I keep a lively pace when I read so I can hang out on something stirring and still maintain a flow. Michael Collier, let me tell you what I see. Timothy Liu, let me tell you. Kevin Higgins…I’m seeing the country, the stops, the bartender who’s made these rails one too many times.

That stinker Robert Pinsky says good poetry is always going someplace. So maybe reviewers, we’re the travel agents. All aboard still means what it did a hundred years ago. By the way, if you want Slate to continue the Pinsky column you gotta go there and like it or say “Amen.” http://www.slate.com/authors.robert_pinsky.html Slate is always asking the mirror, who’s the fairest of them all?

Karen: How would you describe the art of the book review?

Barrett: Poetry is an art. Book reviewing is a skill. Some of us are just a little more compulsive about it. As a racer and a gambler I was into yearling sales, trying to find a young horse that would grow up and win the Derby. Even today if I drive past a horse auction my foot pumps the brake and I fight the steering wheel to keep moving past.

As a reviewer I’d love to find a snappy sharp young writer, sure, but there are better folks than I doing a great job of that: Alice James Books, Anhinga Press, Lost Horse Press, Autumn House Press, and my favorite, the Pitt Poetry Series. My point is this: let the press find the poet, let the poet find the poem, stay out of the way of this important process. Afterwards, I might tease a little of the art out of the collection. I want to help others connect and maybe give up some coin for the book.

Most of my literary influences are drawn from the Daily Racing Form which has been my Bible for thirty years. When I review a book I’m handicapping a race—where’s the early speed, the power, the late kick, the reach and grab, the pain killers and bandages, the odds, the weather conditions—and I’m partly a tout, but most of all I want to win my bets and witness a kind of enthralling beauty that could never be anticipated.

Karen: Do you approach a review as an encounter with a book you love, or an offering of context for a book that is difficult but deserves a wider audience?

Barrett: Every book deserves a wider audience. Poetry is concerned with what Millay called “that purple edge outside most people’s lives.” So reviewing might be about bringing readers and the poet closer together, close to that edge which for most readers is only a distant horizon. That means connecting a few dots, and sometimes you’re dead wrong on the connection or you find a connection the writer didn’t intend. The night sky is real big. You can see Orion any place you look.

Karen: What do you enjoy or loathe when you read other writers’ reviews of literature?

Barrett: Give me some sugar. Show me something. Make it hurt. Let me laugh. It’s easy for poets to get lost in their own beautiful woods, but readers are blind, trying to find a black hat in a dark room. A reviewer that lets me know when I’m getting warmer, who knows where the hat is but still lets me find it on my own (with some minor coaching), well that’s a review for me.

I don’t mind reviews that give a little more background on the author, reviews by people who personally know the author. I find this helpful at times as long as the reviewer is still making tough demands of the book. The only reviews I don’t like are the short ones. Putting feelings in there is all right too, but it must be clear how those feelings were transformed by the experience of reading.

Karen: Do you see current reviewing tendencies that are pernicious, lazy, exciting, or helpful?

Barrett: Blog posts are everyone’s way of having a Taxi-cab confession. Those reviews should be pernicious, lazy, and exciting all at once. I mean hey, some of us take the bus to work. Others ride a skateboard. It’s important for reviewers to know their poetry, but it’s also important for reviewers to come from whichever culture they’re writing for.

The printing press democratized literacy, but the Internet democratizes art. We reviewers are the clowns at this rodeo. The clowns perform a minor but essential task, distracting the angry bull. What am I going to say? That someone is a bad clown? There’s no such thing as a bad clown because what do you expect, he’s a clown after all.

Karen: Keith Taylor has written a thoughtful, nuanced essay on reviewing poetry in today's media environment, and talks about (among other things) the narrowed audience for poetry reviews because of the downsizing of newspaper reviews, saying: “[T]he chance to review a new collection of poems in a place where several thousand people might read it, and to actually be paid something for our labors, has almost disappeared….In the fairly recent past many people still considered a knowledge of the poetry of the moment—even if that knowledge came only from reviews or the occasional poem appearing in a high brow magazine–as an essential element of the life of the mind, or at least as an important ingredient of contemporary culture. If there ever was a consensus about that, it has been forgotten.” Can you talk a little bit about poetry reviews as potentially adding to "the life of the mind"?

Barrett: Hearts have a beat. Brains don’t. So “life of the mind” has a funny chime to it. The artist and sportsman Frank Stella—he had some great racehorses over the years, I’m thinking Brown Arc for one—in 1982 Frank gave six lectures at Cambridge which dealt with issues like the role of the critic in defining contemporary art. This was a time when almost everyone would hear about a work before they saw that piece. Well it’s a different can of soup today. Now we often see the works, read samples, get some news footage before we’ve gotten the accompanying critical narrative. So it’s an exciting time to be an adorer of fine art and a lover of words.

I’m not sure I buy that we’re worse off than the glory days. When literature used to be a club maybe we needed highbrow reviews to find our way onto the scene. But I believe there’s no such thing as a good club. It’s like saying so and so was a well-meaning and kind dictator. There’s no such thing as a good dictator. Literature isn’t just for angels that haven’t fallen, it’s for the rest of us too.

My advice to Taylor is that he tighten his gauchos and accept that we’re not operating in a bricks and mortar world with bricks and mortar reviews. I mean, if no one is coming to your church on Sunday then take your church to the streets. Stand on a box in the Town Square. One of my deceased pals David Franks used to shout into a megaphone “Poetry!… Swim a river of shit if it’s on the other side! ”

I’m one of the lucky ones so in love with poetry I don’t care about the conditions. I don’t need the perfect bed to make poetry love, the perfect light, the perfect sentimental view. What I got right now has problems, but it’s action and it’s fantastic. Taylor’s right, but he should drive his idea to the cemetery. There are a lot of folks lying there with dirt on their faces who’d give anything for the chance to come back, even if it meant a life of fewer paying gigs and fewer newspapers and only online opportunities.

Karen: How do writing and reviewing coexist in your writing life--do they complement each other in some way?

Barrett: There are two parts to your question. The harder one is how do I incorporate writing into my life? A hard knocker like me is going to take his poetry where he can get it. I sleep like a dragon with one eye open. I listen to the wind.

I work with my hands about sixty hours a week in the growing season so I have to compose most of my poems on the jog. I say the poem over and over out loud until it’s burned into me but not so deep I can’t revise it. When the tractor’s home and the loader down, or the horse is put away dry, then I write down the poem singing in my head.

Reviewing is different. There’s referencing involved. Dog eared pages. Underlinings. Long-handed rants on legal pads. But I’m also thinking about the poems in someone’s collection all the time and somehow from all of this a review emerges. I send my notes via postal to my typist who emails the goods back to me and then I send it out.

Sometimes I’m talking with a literary journal. I’ll say whom I’m reading lately or I’ll mention a book and suggest they assign it to someone and maybe I’ll make some kind of arrangement for a title down the road. Often my review just shows up in an editor’s box. I read six books a month and I’ll review two or three of these. So the writing life gets crowded.

One of the reasons I started reviewing this year after a thirty year break was that I didn’t want to be another poet without a book on his shelf. The idea that you can learn to write without learning to read amazes me. You want to learn how to write a novel? The best writing workshop in the world is in the library, in alphabetical order.

Karen: Is that where you get your books (libraries) or do they come to you directly from presses?

Barrett: I don’t like receiving books from publishers. Advance copies? No, thank you. It puts too much pressure on me and I’m a coward about pressure. Same with dogging the cat. Kissing in the bedroom with nightgowns and candles? Forget it. I need to start my kissing in the kitchen where there isn’t any pressure at all, just a few dishes, some with spaghetti stains.

The kitchen I go back to time and again for authors are the literary reviews. I’ll see a poem I like, scavenge the contributor notes. If the poet has a recent book I put a check in the mail. Sometimes they don’t have a book and I wring my hands. I noticed the author Bethany Schultz Hurst had poems in Gargoyle and Rattle and maybe Cimarron Review. My notes say, Great poems, but still no collection. So I’m keeping my eye on her. She’s one to watch.

I like to review books that have been out at least a year, and at least four times I’ve gone back six years. Adam Robinson of Publishing Genius Press calls what I do “keeping the conversation going.” I also like pairing my reviews. In September Loch Raven Review will publish my review of Jessica Fenlon’s Spiritual Side Effects alongside Nikia Leopold’s Simple Pleasures (the 2012 Blue Lights Press winner). Both poets are also well known as artists and both designed their own covers. The hint of a controlling nature in this behavior is contradicted by how each author is so willing to lose herself in a poem without losing control of her lines.

I also look for authors at poetry readings. I read two months ago in the West Village with Becca J. R. Lachman. No way I was letting her get in a cab without palming her The Apple Speaks. The nice thing about hearing an author read is that you get a sense of which poems are favorites. I love finding new favorites in the same book. But it’s nice to make a personal connection with an author. I’m reading Kevin Young’s Ardency right now with the aim of reviewing it but the book is so strong and woven and deep I’m anxious to talk with him about it but I don’t really know him except that he teaches outside of Atlanta. I may just have to take Josh’s train to Georgia after all.

***** 

The next interview in this series is expected to appear next week.

Interview with a Micro-Press: Tiny TOE Press

Today I’m interviewing Michael Davidson about his very small press, Tiny TOE Press. Davidson is a writer, a blogger, and a publisher. He is the author (under the nom de plume, herocious) of the novel Austin Nights (2011), the debut title on Tiny TOE. This micro press has a short but intriguing (and growing) list of titles, which you can find here: http://theopenend.com/

I have a special affection for Tiny TOE, as they handpress their books in a similar way to how I self-published/self-produced my first novel which started my own micro press, Words Like Kudzu. When I finished writing my novel, I wanted to put it out in the world immediately, so I took my bookmaking skills and my love of the Xerox machine and made my own books. Tiny TOE does this, only better. They use rulers, box cutters, and a homemade book-pressing machine they call a jig. Me, I just used my hands and my back and a stapler, and frankly, my back is still paying for it 12 years later.

Karen: How did Tiny TOE get started as a press? 

Michael: Tiny TOE Press got started because of TheOpenEnd.com [TOE]. After ~2 years of building content for TOE, commenting on blogs, and emailing with like-minded people, I managed to meet some publishers/writers who were putting together some good books, but none of them, at least none that I knew, even considered the idea of handpressing their own paperbacks. Tiny TOE Press realized the modest potential of this niche market and made it an option.

Once I made the first copy of my book I felt like this was what I was supposed to be doing: making and writing books. But for this adventure in self-publishing to turn into an adventure in publishing it took the jig. That's really what started Tiny TOE, the jig that was built in a shed.

The jig is made out of wood and bolts. It functions as both a square and a clamp. The jig is crucial for making the spines of our books. We started out with a jig that presses one book at a time. Now we've progressed to a jig that presses four at a time. 

Karen: What place do you think the micro press holds in the publishing world? In the literature world? 

Michael: To use metaphor, the publishing world is a vast bucket with micro presses being occasional droplets into this bucket. Micro presses can and do ripple and splash with some of their titles, but it's rarely anything tidal.

Now in the literature world micro presses are vital because they democratize the written word. So many people can't escape the draw of writing literature, but it is a meteoric event indeed for this breed of writing to break out into the publishing world. I think it's because most of the publishing world can only take so many risks each year, and this number is less than the number of manuscripts in the literature world worth taking a risk on. Micro presses noticed this imbalance and made it their mission to discover these manuscripts that deserved a readership and turn them into consumable books.

Karen: How are you finding authors--do you seek them or do they find you? 

Michael: From the start our jig has been responsible for getting submissions from some talented writers. Our jig put us on the map. It made us discoverable, and writers love discovering new independent presses.

ML Kennedy, the author of The Mosquito Song, is one of the first contributors to TheOpenEnd. After he bought and read our first book, and after he read the post roughly going over how this book was made, he emailed me about the possibility of Tiny TOE Press representing his novella, which TheOpenEnd had published in serial format the year before. We were very proud to collaborate on this sardonic vampire narrative. It's New Pulp.

Mitchell Hagerstrom, the author of Miss Gone-overseas, is a similar kind of story. She contributed some of her prose to TheOpenEnd before the existence of Tiny TOE Press. Once she learned of my book she emailed me a manuscript she had worked on over the span of several years. Her novella read then as it reads now, like a timeless piece of prose from the viewpoint of a nearly unrepresented voice in WWII history.

Joseph Avski and Mark McGraw, author and translator (respectively) of Heart of Scorpio, had no affiliation with TheOpenEnd. They got in touch with me after they watched the time-lapse video of me handpressing a book. I read their multi-voiced novella about a famous Colombian boxer and immediately saw how the story of this boxer mirrors the history of his country. Being Colombian, I knew this would be our next book. It was written in the stars.

Writers have been finding us, and new ones are finding us always, but now that we've been around a little longer and have a better idea of the small press world, we have our eyes on a few writers that we'd love to work with.

Karen: I love the particular variety of formats you are offering--you sell each title as both handmade book and e-book. How did you arrive at that model and how is it working for you? 

Michael: While writers care a lot about distribution and reach when it comes to their work, and this requires a more industrial approach to bookmaking, they also value the way their book is produced.

Handpressing their book gives each copy an energy that the industrial approach--with its offset or POD printers--cannot imitate. When handpressed, their book is not only a work of literature, but also a piece of craftsmanship.

The ebook does what the handpressed book cannot, namely, reach thousands of people wanting to read good books on their ereader in an instant.

I like the model. It has gotten our books some interesting press and their share of readerly activity.

Karen: What other micro presses do you admire and why? 

Michael: Several come to mind immediately. In no specific order, Publishing Genius and Mudluscious Press. They put together clever bundle packages and experiment with marketing strategies to move their stock. Lazy Fascist Press has released some notable titles and seems to leave a lot of control in the writer's hands re: overall design. Calamari Press and Dzanc Books for their painstaking care in designing book objects. O/R Books for their incredible website and progressive ebook business model. Featherproof for their Free Mini-Books. Tyrant Books for their hype. Civil Coping Mechanism for their roster. Melville House and Spuyten Duyvil for their novella series.

*****

You can find interviews with Michael Davidson on further topics here and here.

Don't miss recent interviews with Spencer Dew, on book reviewing, and Mike DeCapite, on writing. And stay tuned for more interviews about The Art of the Book Review.

The Art of the Book Review: Spencer Dew

Today I'm posting the first in a series of interviews with small press writers and reviewers about the art of book reviewing, and the state of book reviews. In the process of getting reviews for my own books and for books I published by other writers, I've been paying closer attention than ever to reviews. I have noticed a wide range of quality: There is quite a wide variety of writings that call themselves reviews in this new media world. But the word "quality" doesn't even get at the variety I'm talking about--that sounds like I like one person's writing better than another's. But there is the quality of the writing, the quality of the critical thought, the quality of the reviewer's idea of what a book review should be, and more. Has new media itself degraded (or evolved) the idea of a book review? To some writers, the blog format seems like a good excuse to write a casual review that may be even less thoughtful than a blurb. To other writers, a Goodreads account is a fine platform to write intelligent responses to steady reading. And there are plenty of writers, young and old, who are writing well-considered book reviews and getting paid much less than they were a decade ago, or not getting paid at all.

Today I'm interviewing Spencer Dew, who writes fiction short and long, teaches Religious Studies, and is the author of a critical study of Kathy Acker. Spencer is a staff reviewer at the online litmag decomP magazinE and a regular reviewer at the long-running small press review, Rain Taxi Review of Books. You can find his reviews at those respective sites, and his writings and interviews here: http://www.spencerdew.com/

Karen: Paul Theroux has said (in an introduction to his book, Sunrise with Seamonsters) that writing book reviews is a "much greater necessity for a writer than teaching how to write at a university, or leading seminars on literary culture." What do you think?


Spencer: What a strange quote!  Collecting marbles is a greater necessity for a writer than hoarding scraps of yarn, but, of course, neither of those things is actually necessary.

Now, since “writing book reviews” requires reading, and, ideally, requires critical reading, reading that attempts to analyze the technique employed, to figure out the mechanics of how the text works, how it was put together, and since it’s an act not just of engagement or experience or feeling but also concerted second-order stuff, contemplation and then the articulation of the results of that contemplation, “writing book reviews” is one practice that hones skills necessary for a writer, to be sure.  But that doesn’t mean a writer needs to write book reviews, per se.

Karen: What do you believe a book review should DO? What's its job? Is it an opinion piece, an educated bit of contextualizing, an encounter between one peculiar reader and one particular book, or is the reviewer supposed to take the book on its own terms—after determining and naming those terms? Is it the book's job to reach the reviewer or is it the reviewer's job to find the pulse of the book?

Spencer: I think the job of the review—and the reviewer—depends on the publication, but I can give you a handful of examples from my work for Rain Taxi.

When I reviewed Julia Scheeres’s book on Jonestown, A Thousand Lives, I located this book within the scholarly and popular literature on Jonestown, showed what was new and effective in this treatment, and debunked some of her inflated claims about being, as her subtitle unsubtly and incorrectly states, the “untold story.”  I assumed that readers of my review might have heard of this book and had certainly heard of Jonestown but probably hadn’t read anything on it before; I wanted to give some sense of what was out there and how this book stacked up against those other sources (including Stanley Nelson’s 2007 documentary for PBS, a source which casts a heavy shadow on Scheeres’s work).  If you’re going to read more than one book on Jonestown, Scheeres provides something useful; but if you’re only going to read one book on the topic, this isn’t the one you should read.  That is an informed opinion, drawing on the fact that I routinely teach about and teach books and articles on Peoples Temple and Jonestown, as well as the fact that I spend a great deal of time critically evaluating books.

When, to offer another valence, I wrote my review essays of the collected work of Michael Muhammad Knight for the comic book series Hellblazer, I began with the strong desire to draw attention to these pieces and, in my reviews, to analyze them in new ways.  I offered an overview of Knight’s oeuvre, some thoughts on why he is an important voice in the contemporary scene, and advances a criticism of misogynistic tendencies and the tricky way he presents such tendencies in his works.  On Hellblazer I argued for a central tension throughout the series between oppressive forms of authority and the temporary liberations provided by friendship.  Parliament versus the pub, or something like that—but, again, what I was doing was saying, look, these are neat books, rewarding in many ways, and one thing that’s going on here, that is important and fascinating, is this.  That is also a function of the review, a task of the reviewer.

Writing on Jarett Kobek’s novella Atta, a book about the 9/11 hijacker and including scenes describing the hijacking, I tried, foremost, to show what and how Kobek was doing what he was doing and raise a series of questions about both underlying claims about a certain mode of Islamic education—recitation and memorization, with its solid Quranic roots, which is played up here as central to Atta’s fanatical mindset—and about why an artist might engage in such an exercise of entering into the mind of a historical figure like this.  I hope I provide, in the end, some tools for wrestling with a book that, I believe, was designed to be wrestled with.

One final example: the linked stories in Maleficium, by Martine Desjardins, were seductively creepy, and reading them—-with, sure, the knowledge that I was going to write a review of the book—-I got lost in the decadence, the texture.  My review was largely an appreciation of what I took to be the most compelling qualities of the storyline and the prose, with ample samples of the latter for the reader to experience as a kind of preview.

This is by no means an exhaustive typology of how book reviews function, but these examples do address your question.

Karen: There's all these levels of reviews out there. It's no longer just the New York Times Book Review, literary journals, and your hometown newspaper. Now it's also blog reviews, online litmag reviews, Amazon and Goodreads reviews, and all the places that Amazon and Goodreads reviews "show up," too—like Worldcat or Google searches. Likewise, one reviewer might cross-post their reviews in several spots online—LibraryThing, Goodreads, Amazon, etc. In your view, what has this expansion done for the standards of book reviews? Do you think that today's online readers are simply "savvy enough" to process the different expectations of different venues? Or do you see more poorly-written, poorly-thought-out reviews being generated overall?

Spencer: There is a real distinction between thoughtful criticism and the simple “reviewing” that occurs when someone gives stars or thumbs or offers a few words in praise of a recent Panini on Yelp.  Putting thumbs and stars on things can be very useful in some situations—I don’t want to go to a bad dentist, for instance, and I like living in a world where feedback can be provided on such services—but this isn’t the same as the work of a critic, which needs to be broadly informed and involve serious engagement and consideration.  My experience with Amazon reviews has not found them useful; my experience with Goodreads, which is quite slight, has mainly been to offer me a list of books that folks I know have or want to read, which is like walking into someone’s house and looking at their bookshelves, which is nice.  There are some great bloggers and great online literary magazines.

This might be a tangent, but a few days ago I was meeting with a friend who brought up the fact that a major independent bookstore here in Chicago has been fighting bankruptcy for years and only continues to exist due to some rather miraculous subsidies.  My first impulse was to say, well, it would be a shame if that store closed, but when I really thought about it, what I value about the existence of that store is that I can walk in and see some well curated tables offering me a sampling of new books I wouldn’t otherwise know about.  I don’t buy books there, because books are very expensive.  I read almost entirely via the great public library system of the city of Chicago, when I’m in Chicago, and via Interlibrary Loan when I am elsewhere.  So—without delving more into this issue of bookstores and their functions, one you have written on with eloquence elsewhere—I think that lists of books, with or without stars, on Goodreads or Amazon or blogs or lit magazines can be profoundly useful for precisely this sense of discovery.  But what the bookstore has is one guy who, like an editor of a literary review, carefully curates what motley assortment of books will be on display, vetting them, vouching for them.  His is a kind of discernment that can be, as you say in your next question, “trusted.” And that is a valuable thing.

Karen: What do you read a book review to find out? Where do you like to read book reviews? Do you trust certain journals or certain reviewers?  Do readers of book reviews think in terms of "trust"?

Spencer: I read Rain Taxi every quarter in print and follow all of their on-line updates, I read the New York Times book review section every week, I read most of the stuff that the New York Review of Books posts on-line, and I follow links from Arts and Letters Daily to assorted reviews.  I at least flip through and read around in the reviews in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion (because I’m a religion professor), and I visit sites like Spiked Review of Books, and The Guardian’s book section every few months.  When I’m at a good bookstore and feeling flush I’ll buy a Bookforum and London Review of Books.

As for “trust,” I trust the editorial staff of these places to attempt to pair talented reviewers with interesting, worthwhile books.  One of the reasons I started writing for Rain Taxi is that I read Rain Taxi and knew lots folks (first out in Boulder, the Naropa crowd, etc.; then in Chicago) who read Rain Taxi and respected what it was doing in terms of covering small presses, poetry, stuff you most folks wouldn’t otherwise know about.  So I read Rain Taxi to get a sense for new books out there in the world; I probably put in an Interlibrary Loan request for four books out of every issue, on average.

Karen: Do you think all books assigned should be reviewed, or can you imagine a situation where a reviewer just doesn't have an interesting enough engagement with the book to produce a worthwhile review essay?  Or is there, in fact, a science to reviewing which can produce (with some consistency) a thoughtful essay?

Spencer: One can produce a “thoughtful essay” on even a rancid piece of writing, but the question would be why.  If a non-fiction book makes an argument that needs to be debunked, say, or a book of poems expresses a fascist sensibility that needs to be challenged—those are solid reasons for a necessary and useful review of a “bad” book.

There’s another situation that is a more common occurrence for me:  with decomP, I try to review as many of the books that come in as possible, as a kind of service.  I feel a responsibility to seriously engage with these works, a responsibility to the authors.  So, for instance, I reviewed a few years back a book that was really quite awful—just bad writing, sloppy, boring, self-important, etc.  But I wrote a lengthy essay on it, and I gave lengthy quotes from it.  I wanted anyone reading the review to see that I was giving the book a fair shake, letting the book speak for itself, but I also wanted the author to know that I had not tossed out the book halfway through but mucked through it and given it a compassionate and critical reading, flagging what I took to be serious problems in a way that would be practically useful for the author.  Here I’m afraid I sound like a teacher, which is also what I am: you don’t just stamp a paper with a D, you have a responsibility to clearly explain why the paper earned that grade and how it could be improved, etc., etc.  For a publication like decomP, which is rooted, as I understand it, in a notion of literary community, the function of book reviews must also reflect that ideal—and there is, then, a pedagogical function; the book review isn’t just a blurb about a book worth reading, it also is a chance to talk about what makes good writing and about how writing works.



Karen: This particular blog (Karen the Small Press Librarian) has a policy of running largely positive reviews, because I don't think that small- and micro-press books should be buried before they have a chance to live. Not that I ask anyone to lie about their true feelings for a book, but I have declined to run some negative reviews. Thanks for telling us a bit about the delicate art of writing critical reviews of little-known authors.

Spencer: Thanks so much for including me in this discussion, and thanks, even more, for your support of and investment in, via things like this excellent blog, the ideal of artistic community.

***** 

I want to thank Atticus Books for their discussion series, Six Degrees Left, which was an inspiration for this forthcoming series of interviews. While Atticus publishes the interviews in panel discussion style, I enjoy their intelligent questions and relevant topics.

I'd also like to thank writer Tim Hall for pointing out that "More people are indeed reading more these days; but what they're actually reading is online product reviews." Thus, the Amazon book review may not be so easily dismissed.

Interview with Mike DeCapite

Mike DeCapite's writing fascinates me for being both impossible to stop reading and impossible to pinpoint. His latest chapbook, Creamsicle Blue, (which I reviewed in January), is a 27 page piece of nonfiction with the scope of a novel and the depth of a meditation. He's also the author of the novel, Through the Windshield (Sparkle Street Books), the unpublished novel Ruined for Life!, and the chapbook Sitting Pretty (CUZ Editions). Recently I asked him some questions about writing.

K: I was particularly struck in Creamsicle Blue with how closely entwined I found the writing and the living. Not merely that it was “autobiographical” but that you were walking through your life hand in hand with writing: The consciousness born in writing mattered to your life and your life lived mattered to the writing. Are you a “daily writer,” or do you think the practice of writing is more than just what happens between pen and paper?

M: I don’t write every day, not anymore, but I’ve developed a form that’s open to chance, that allows me to write things down as they happen. If I’m working on something, I’m working on it all the time, although days and even weeks might go by without my writing anything down. Since quitting smoking a few years ago, I have an aversion to sitting down at a table with a typewriter or computer. It’s the last thing I want to do. I’ve dismantled all my rituals around writing, and now I just write on the fly, wherever I am. So now more than ever, writing is more for me than just what happens between pen and paper. I feel like I’m living inside what I’m working on, gathering observations and bits of conversation, climbing up a ladder to add a detail here or there. Since my work is no longer localized at a green Formica kitchen table in Brooklyn, it’s generalized. Wherever I go, I’m in it. It’s a daydream. And as I get older, I’m less and less inclined to betray the dream by putting it into words. It’s so pleasant to go around in the dream. I’m trying very hard to avoid saying I’m lazy.

K: When did writing enter your life and what made you start? Did you explore other art media along the way, or was it always writing?

M: I’ve never explored another medium since I started writing in earnest, in my late teens. The first book I wrote was a book of journals when I was 18. I wrote it as a book, typing it as I went and showing it to my friends, with an idea that it would somehow be published when it was done. It covered a year, October 1980 through October ’81.

K: You’ve said that “Creamsicle Blue is as close as I’ve gotten to the kind of thing I’ve always wanted to do.” How would you describe that thing? How did it show up in your earlier chapbooks or books?

M: I don’t have any interest in telling stories. Which, let’s face it, is a handicap in a writer. Even Through the Windshield, which is full of stories, isn’t interested in telling a story. It imagines the novel as flat surface, like a painting or mosaic. That book has a dailiness, a diaristic quality, a feeling of the sufficiency of now. It stops time. It’s a place to go, that book. Because it doesn’t go anywhere. There’s no plot, so there’s more room for food and weather and the way the city looks at night and stray, momentary feelings and bits of reverie. Anyway, without especially trying to, it gets past linear time.

My second (never-published) novel, Ruined for Life!, attempts the same thing in a more deliberate way and with less success. It does compile a lot of different textures: narrative, journal entries, conversations, essays, prose poems, notes. But it’s not as disjointed as I envisioned it, and it turned out to be fairly linear after all.

Creamsicle Blue, I hope, manages to be nonlinear while still describing an arc. The form of it I developed in a column I was writing for a couple of years for a magazine in Cleveland called angle. I was living in a little room in San Francisco, drinking a lot, between drafts of Ruined for Life!, which I hadn’t even been able to look at for a couple of years. I didn’t think I could write anymore, I’d drunk the ceiling down on my imagination. And I knew a woman in Cleveland, a poet named Amy Sparks, who was starting an arts magazine with two other people, and I heard myself ask her if I could write a column. I told her I’d write a monthly weather column. Figuring everything’s weather, so I could write whatever I wanted. And she said okay. I only did it to get myself back in shape to write another draft of Ruined for Life!, but that column became the only writing I’d been happy with in a long time. It was called Radiant Fog. I wrote maybe fifteen or twenty of them, just going around with my eyes open, leaning on street corners and sitting in bus stops, collecting details and piecing them together till they took on some life or pull of their own. And after I quit writing for the magazine I continued to write in that form.

K: As a reader or a writer, how would you describe the sometimes-fine line between autobiographical fiction, memoir, creative nonfiction, and fiction based closely on life observations? Why do you think poetry is rarely tagged as autobiographical?

M: I don’t know what they mean by creative nonfiction. All writing is creative. I think it’s an attempt to put a literary shine on a piece of nonfiction. Or it means a book is entertaining even though it’s nonfiction. It’s reassuring. And I guess in creative nonfiction you’re not writing about yourself, and in autobiographical fiction and memoir you’re writing about yourself. Autobiographical fiction is a label someone else sticks on you. No one says, “I write autobiographical fiction,” right? Who wants to say that?

I just call myself a writer. All writing is imaginative work. You can use your imagination to invent a world or to illuminate the world around you. I do the latter because that’s what I’m better at—it’s my natural inclination. It’s just a matter of what your interest is, as a writer, as a reader.

I guess poetry isn’t tagged as autobiographical because that’s its default position. Which isn’t true of prose.

K: Which writers or books stood out for you or influenced you along your path? What did you see they were doing that excited you?

M: Celine, for the directness and intimacy and force of his voice, and also for the speed and jumpiness of his style. James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, with its variety of textures and Agee’s statement near the beginning that if it were up to him, the book would be just pieces of wood and iron, and bits of cloth and food and excrement. Sometimes it’s not even a book but just a line. Exterminator! [William Burroughs], for instance—just the words a novel on the front—I can still see them, next to the big roach: that classification in itself was inspiring! You open it up and it’s all these unrelated short pieces, but on the front it says “a novel.” So that forces you to do some reassessment. It’s a novel because he had the nerve to say so. A book like Naked Lunch shows you that you can put whatever you want between two covers and call it a novel. Which is true back to the beginning of the form—look at Tristram Shandy. Nothing’s more freewheeling than that. But my influence from books was secondary to my influence from music. I probably got more from Freak Out! or Lumpy Gravy than I did from The Wild Boys. With music you get it right away, what’s cool about cutups and collages, why this works.

Also from music I got the idea of standing up there and singing your song, if you know what I mean. Rather than fooling around with fiction. For which I’m unsuited anyway.

If I had to pick one signpost work, it would be “Tangled Up in Blue” or “Where Are You Tonight?” My whole life, those songs. And what Dylan does later, on Time Out of Mind and Love & Theft—that method of conveying information—that method of composition, taking lines from here and there—is exactly what I’d like to be able to do in prose. That method of narration. Nonlinear, cinematic. This quality is always called cinematic, but songs do this kind of thing very naturally and no one seems to notice. The way old blues songs are put together, with verses chosen here and there from a common pool to supply a rhyme, is much more radical and nonlinear than works that set out deliberately to play with narrative. The guy’s in Georgia, he’s in Tennessee, he’s lost his woman, he’s got a woman, she’s an angel, she treats him like a dog, and when he gets in a jam for a rhyme he goes down in the ocean and sees the crabs doing the shimmee shee. And this method does a better job of describing or hinting at the dimensions of experience—the dimensions of a mind, a life—than loading the work with every memory and sensory detail, which would be a common inclination in prose. Songs like “Trying to Get to Heaven” and “Not Dark Yet”? Doesn’t get any better than that. All those images, all those scenes. Those songs, rather than summing up a life, suggest its dimensions—while retaining its richness and leaving its mystery undisturbed. Dylan doesn’t even confine himself to his own era. “I was riding in a buggy with Miss Mary Jane.” How’s he get away with that? I don’t care how much he steals—that’s part of the point of what he does, it’s part of the meaning of those songs, and it’s part of their effectiveness. Well, that’s enough about Dylan. Van Morrison’s song “St. Dominic’s Preview” was a big inspiration for Creamsicle Blue. The way he goes seamlessly from washing windows while listening to Edith Piaf to Paris in the first verse, the way he jumps around in time. Great, great song.

I’m more excited by works that are put together than by works that are written. But I’m not sure that influence is anything more than confirmation. It’s a reminder of what you already know. Maybe encouragement is more a more accurate term than influence. Certain works encourage you to trust your instincts. And you’re influenced by your own work. You write something that leaps forward, ahead of where you are, and then you write to catch up with it.

*****

Find Mike DeCapite's books here:
http://www.sparklestreet.com/MikeDecapite.html

You can find excerpts from DeCapite's novel Ruined for Life! at spots around the web, including these chapters on the blog Boogie Woogie Flu and the litmag Sensitive Skin.

Lessons of the Book Tour

I'm just back from a brief book tour for my new book of fiction, and I wanted to take a moment to reflect on what I learned this time about touring.

Reading in bars is a very relaxing atmosphere. It's great for the quality of the reading--it may even be a better place for a reading than many other venues, but it is not always good for selling books. People are hoarding their dollars for beer; they have come to be entertained, not to be sold something; and often there is not an obvious spot to place the books for maximum showcase (and minimum shoplifting risk).

Invest in the non-digital. Choose co-readers whose writing you love and then enjoy the hell out of reading with them, chat with strangers who attend your readings, invite friends and acquaintances out for dinner or drinks after the reading, meet one-on-one with other writers in each city when you can, and visit bookstores. The internet age is training us to be brains with eyes and a mouse-clicking finger for a body, but real people still respond to real people.

Bookstores still sell books, even small press books. Bookstores still attract readers who want to buy books. Meet your booksellers along the book tour. Do research to figure out what indie bookstores along your route would be a good match for your book; who takes consignment; and to whom you should speak, if that info is available. Indie booksellers are still interested in authors working hard for their book, and if they think it intersects their customers' tastes, they can become a great ally via the Hand Sell. Meanwhile, you should become an ally to the bookstore by directing folks there—let your people know that your book is for sale at _______ Bookstore, and let them know what you like about the store. What books attracted your eye when you were there?

Don't judge a reading by the number of people who show up to it. Sometimes a small reading audience is composed of 100% writers and editors on the verge of becoming your literary comrades. Sometimes one person becomes a huge fan. Sometimes a listener gives you a really useful piece of feedback.

You'll pick up books along the way and you won't always get rid of as many of your books as you'd like. You'll wish that you'd packed more shirts and less of almost everything else. Pack travel-sized toiletries. Bring one pair of jeans instead of two. Two pairs of shoes instead of three or four. Ship books back to yourself mid-tour if you need to. In most cities, there's a Mailboxes Etc or UPS Store around the corner.

When reading, make sure you stay interested in reaching your audience, in staying open. Make sure the reading stays fresh for you. If you read the same passage at different events, figure out how to mix things up for yourself in other ways. Read a slight variation. Emphasize a different aspect of the book or the character. Wear a different type of clothing to see how it affects you. Venture out of your comfort zone in some way. Be open to learning more about your own book or yourself as a reader.

Reading from excerpts printed out on pages of 14-point font is easier on middle-aged eyes, but don't forget to flash your book cover from the stage.

If you feel fear or low confidence coming upon you during your reading, remember that this is coming from you, not them. No matter what some of the audience is doing, most people there still want a great show, and if you've prepared, you have the power to deliver that. Buck up. Keep going.

You like your book. You already did all the hard work in writing and editing it. Now it's your job to serve the writing. In a sense, it's beyond you at this point. Don't think of your book tour as egotistical self-promotion. Think of it as getting the book to its intended audience. There is a humility in the completion of a book, and the life that it takes on in readers' hands. In terms of your reading, this means you mostly need to read slowly and loudly enough to let your voice reach their ears.

You can prevent even travel sickness (etc) from ruining your reading with the right amount of preparation. Know your reading selection almost by heart. Practice how you want to read it. Choose what words you want to emphasize. Wear something you love. When you have everything in place, if one thing goes wrong (I had a migraine for one reading that made me feel like I was sideways in my body) you can still sail through a great performance and no one will be the wiser.

One MC along my tour did a beautiful thing: He introduced each of the readers not only with our written bio, but also with his own brief summation of our writing. Then after we read, he responded to our reading with what he liked about it. He was thoughtful and articulate, and I felt it lent an extra weight and coherence to a well-curated reading. The audience had a strong sense of why the presenter was presenting us.

For more tips on the small press book tour:

Poet Laura Davis (Braiding the Storm, Finishing Line Press, Fall 2012) recently interviewed me on her blog about planning and funding an indie book tour here:
"Chapbook Rookie: Interview with author Karen Lillis on Planning Your Own Book Tour"

Fiction author Allison Amend (Things That Pass for Love, OV/Dzanc Books, 2008) shares tips on the book tour at Glimmer Train here:
"Instructions for a Do-It-Yourself Book Tour"

The Awl recently ran a feature called "Nine Writers And Publicists Tell All About Readings And Book Tours," and I especially liked the interview with Laurie Weeks (Zipper Mouth, Feminist Press) about being open to her audience and in the moment in her readings.

Amazon and Literary Culture: A Discussion

I'm excited that Atticus Books included me in a lively panel discussion on indie bookstores, bookselling culture, e-books, and literary culture in the age of Amazon.

"Is Amazon the Death of Literary Culture?"
Atticus Books blog
Six Degrees Left series
February 14, 2012
http://atticusbooksonline.com/sdl-amazon1

Panelists:
Author, small press blogger, ex-bookstore clerk Karen Lillis
Author Laura Ellen Scott (Death Wishing, Ig Publishing)
Poet & bookseller Angela Williams (Politics & Prose)

Moderator Lacey N. Dunham is the publicist for Atticus Books and a former bookseller.

I find myself still asking questions about Amazon after this discussion is over, even about its literal place in literary (publishing) culture. Is it a tool, is it a format, is it a middle man, is it a store, is it a mall, is it a yard sale, is it a billboard, is it a catalog, is it a database, is it a data aggregator, is it a software, is it a gadget, is it an app, is it a bookstore, is it a publisher, is it a predatory public company that sells whatever it thinks the public wants to buy and doesn't give a damn about books?

Feel free to weigh in via the comments section with your own thoughts.