Very Literary: A community blog

Fixed Star: Sylvia Plath's Novel at 50

2013-02-07T01:10:00Z

Sometimes, the interactive splendor of writing - talking to people in order to write about them, writing about books the people in my life are writing - overwhelms the pleasure of reading. As it is, I allocate most of my reading time to new writing on the internet. If I don't read the Paris Review Daily and the Beheld in the morning, I am a nightmare. Otherwise, there is so much astonishing contemporary writing being published, I appreciate that it's impossible to keep up with it all - I'm grateful for what parts of the current splash my way.

To wit, rereading has become a guilty pleasure. Nothing provokes an attack of rereading like unassailable stress. When I'm in such a mood as I've been since the New Year, no matter how taken I am with whatever book I'm in the middle of, I'll put it aside and forget about it. I'll reread the Bell Jar until my eyes give, then I'll listen to the audiobook.

Sylvia Plath's only novel turned 50 in January. To commemorate its British release by Faber and Faber, the publisher drove the internet crazy. Its new cover, featuring a woman applying makeup in a compact mirror, exposes a lot of points worth fighting about: if a great work of literature is packaged as "chick lit," is that diminishing because literature for women is still perceived as a lesser literature? If a book packaged like this is more likely to be purchased in a supermarket, is that still doing wrong by the title? Of all the titles, at least the Bell Jar has enjoyed so many varied cover designs since 1963, a trip to Wonderbook or Cupboard Maker will probably yield the discovery of several copies from which to choose. I admire Shirley Tucker's 1966 edition*, the first for Faber, immensely, and if you can't locate a copy, you can hang a poster of it where it can most disorient visitors.

The 50th anniversary cover debacle has been covered so thoroughly, I forgot all about the new biography of Plath that came out in January. As it happens, three books on Sylvia Plath will be out by the middle of the year!

Carl Rollyson's American Isis: the Life and Art of Sylvia Plath, occasioned by unprecedented access to her archives, came out in January. This week saw the release of Andrew Wilson's Mad Girl's Love Song: Sylvia Plath's Life Before Ted (and if you, Harrisburg-area resident, want to stop by Barnes & Noble in Camp Hill and order it from them, you'll have to order it for home delivery, but members get free shipping and the book is half-off). According to its description, it's the first biography of Plath to focus exclusively on her young life. The first it may remain, but by April it won't be the only one. Pain, Parties, Work: Sylvia Plath in New York, Summer 1953 by Elizabeth Winder is the one I'm looking forward to the most since it deals exclusively with the events of Plath's guest editorship at Mademoiselle.

Since her creative output has been so important to my development as a writer, I don't like to endorse books about her more than her own books. It just so happens that in addition to the Bell Jar and her Ariel poems, Paul Alexander's 1991 Plath biography, Rough Magic, is one of my favorite books of all time. Throughout the book, Alexander catalogs as comprehensively as Plath did at every turn the minutae of her triumphs and defeats. Every grade, every rejection is logged and made organically part of the narrative. By the time I read Rough Magic, I was familiar with the circumstances of Plath's life. I knew she briefly assumed a teaching post at her alma mater, Smith College, when she and husband Ted Hughes settled for a time in the US, but I didn't know about the New Yorker rejection, for instance, that came amidst seeing old friends. Those specific moments - that juxtaposition of the small with the large - impact her story enormously. Rough Magic is worthy of unabashed admiration as a piece of writing not only because of Alexander's use of such details but because of something Plath's mother recognized in the biographer:

...she was struck by the fact that it was her daughter's work - not her life or, as was often the case with fans, her suicide - that caused me to phone her in the first place.

I hope these new biographies inspire new readers to overlook whatever ridiculous cover the Bell Jar might have in coming years and love it.

* - Tucker discussed her experience designing the Bell Jar for Faber's blog, the Though Fox. About Plath's husband, Ted Hughes, being a Faber author: "So, one was really aware of all that."

On Money

2012-12-11T06:40:00Z

Last week, tumblr and twitter accounts were launched to anonymously provoke a dialogue about who pays writers. As Dustin Kurtz, marketing manager at Melville House noted, this information is not purposefully obscured and is reported comprehensively and annually in the Writer's Marketplace. But:

In part...writers see themselves as the allies of the magazines or blogs that may be paying them nothing at all, or only token amounts. They care about the well-being of these venues and enjoy reading them, and don’t want to seem unappreciative.

Providing carefully maintained showcases for the varied, diverse, incredible work that deserves as many eyes as possible is a valuable service and a thing apart from writing. Editing and publishing are important, but editors could not assemble the radiant issues that inspire donations, subscriptions, and loyal readerships if not for the writers who contribute their work. When I write for free, I prefer to think of it as pitching in to something I would - to put it lightly - rather be there than not.

Within days of "Who Pays" going live, Forbes ran an inflammatory article about Lena Dunham - she of the three-point-seven-million dollar advance - and how "weird" she claims it is, to venture into writing as a career expecting to be paid. It appears that the statement Forbes culled from Dunham is part of a piece of writing itself - that is, not a statement issued by her, reflecting her feelings about writing, but potentially a piece of fiction. Still, at its core, being made several million dollars for the promise of work is weird. Not being paid to work is weird. This inconsistency that has been able to flourish in publishing is weird.

This is an important conversation, but it is one I dread having with a lot of my friends who are young, at the beginning of their careers, and making compromises between making money and developing their skills as writers. Should this swarm of news preface a conversation in which I am the listener, I assume I am in for a long coffee, dinner, or bus ride restraining myself from quoting Joan Didion:

Do not whine....Do not complain. Work harder. Spend more time alone.

I am used to thinking of it on an individual basis, of course, where it is as easy to be generative as saying: stop complaining! Pick yourself up and keep trying. Pitch the paying markets hard, assert yourself tirelessly, act like you deserve it! Like the aforementioned Dunham says:

The worst stuff that you say sounds better than the best stuff that other people say.

That's the individual basis, though. And one of my favorite articles I have read this year, the Billfold's interview with Natasha-Vargas Cooper on how she does money, illuminates the difficulty of getting by as a freelance journalist, and Vargas-Cooper is incredible. This is pervasive, this problem with money. This is an issue of the publishing industry itself and how it has formed amidst evolution away from the old model.

The magazines and blogs make up, for me, the reason that I write. When I thought writing was a past-tense activity, strictly Melville-Poe-Hemingway, I was not willing to invest myself in it, not until I discovered who is writing now and who is publishing them, what a vibrant world contemporary small publishing is, full of people who are doing things because they must be done and they are not waiting for one of six (or five) stamps of approval.

It is rough in an industry full of utopian vision to swallow the necessity for business savvy, but the collapse of gatekeepers, the diminishing requirement of bulky overhead, and increased access to an understanding of how the market works keeps me optimistic that things will change for the better as long as people keep insisting that they must. And no one insists like a writer.

A Bit of Black Ink on Curtis Smith

2012-11-08T03:29:11Z

I crossed paths with Curtis Smith online, even though we live within a half-hour drive of one another. A writer based in Hershey, participating in the same cozy literary scene as me, we also have common connections to presses based as far away as Louisiana. When he cited my academic grandfather (my professor's professor, John Gardner) as a formative influence, I knew this was a special case of the kind of connectivity enabled by the internet. Proud as I am of this, I am more so that Smith is a local author and that he obliged to answer a few questions over these past few storm-riven days.

You got your MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts! I have several friends who went there and one who teaches there now. How did getting an MFA factor into your development as a writer?

For me, it was a pretty important step. For five years, I wrote and published a handful of stories. Beyond core classes in college I hadn’t studied English or writing. I’m a high school teacher. In the early-to-mid nineties, school districts paid a nice percentage of tuition for grad classes, so I went and got a MFA.

I learned a lot about craft and style and was exposed to a lot of work I never would have read. John Gardner's Art of Fiction springs to mind. Mostly, I think of Kundera, Bowles, Salter, Boll, Glichrist, Beattie, Barth. The most important aspect for me was the atmosphere. On campus, I met people from all over the country. I understood that if I wanted my writing to get out there, I was going to have a lot of competition from folks who wanted the same things I did. This realization forced me to hold my work to a higher standard. I started asking myself tougher questions. I think that’s what helped the most.

Your new story collection, Beasts and Men, is coming out on Press 53 in the spring - what is it about and what has the process of getting that together been like?

Beasts and Men is twenty-some flash pieces and four longer stories. All but one have been previously published in lit journals including Los Angeles Review, Florida Review, Smokelong, Monkeybicycle, Hobart, Quick Fiction, Blip, Gargoyle, Wigleaf, Frigg, Artifice, Corium, Pear Noir!, and Night Train. When I was putting the collection together, it dawned on me that a number of stories involved interactions with animals. The title is from one of the stories: Beasts and Men.

For this book, the process was different from my previous books. I had been reading a lot of very, very short fiction - I enjoyed the compact, poetic nature of the form. At the same time, I got ready to toss thirty-some old notebooks taking up space in the basement. The notebooks were ten, fifteen, twenty years old and filled with fragments of old stories. Before throwing them out, I went through them and jotted down the images or lines that struck me. I used a small notebook and wrote a single rescued item at the top of each page. Later I came back and made stories from the ones that led me somewhere. It was a fun process.

You've published with Press 53 a few times, how is it to have that kind of relationship with a press?

It’s pretty cool. I appreciate having a press that likes my work. Press 53 really respects their writers- their editing isn’t heavy handed. The whole process - from story order to cover art to fonts - is a collaborative effort. In return, I feel very loyal to them - I’ll do whatever I can to help the title and help them see a bit of black ink. No one’s in this side of the publishing world for the money, and I feel a big obligation to make sure my titles at least break even.

How is being a writer in the Harrisburg area?

It’s been good by me. In the old days, perhaps one needed a local lit scene. With the advent of the internet and social networking, I don’t know if it matters where one lives anymore. Harrisburg is great, though - we have one of the country’s coolest bookstores with the Midtown Scholar. And I’m a tankful of gas from Baltimore and Philly and New York. It’s easy to fill up and do a reading and get back home all in a day.

Your other books - a novel, Lovepain, and an essay collection, Witness - are, respectively, forthcoming from Aqueous and released on Sunnyoutside. I want to add that I love those presses.

If Press 53 and Sunnyoutside and Aqueous were the only ones who published all my future books, I’d consider myself fortunate. I’d be honored to stay with them through the rest of my writing life.

Do you have any readings lined up in support of Beasts and Men or any work forthcoming in journals?

My calendar is loaded to support the cause. This spring, I have a couple readings in Philly and one each in Reading and Baltimore. I'll be doing book signings, too - one will be at the Midtown Scholar, also in the spring.

I've been lucky to be on a good run placing my stories and essays, so outside of those pieces, I don't have any individual pieces seeking a home in journals. As far as new work, I'm bouncing between planning a new novel and writing sketches for a nonfiction book looking back on my thirty years of teaching high school. I'm not sure what will become of these last two projects - we shall see.

Dear readers and Wayfaring Googlers, I hope you are not too laid under with Sandy, election fatigue, and imminent storms. Out of the goodness of my heart I hope you are not, but particularly because this weekend - Friday November 9 through Sunday, November 11 - is the Third Annual Harrisburg Book Festival at the Midtown Scholar! I will be on an unbeatable panel with Nathaniel Gadsden and Ann Elia Stewart (whose path I first crossed here on Very Literary) at 2 p.m. on Saturday, November 10 on Stage Two in the Scholar's new class room!

See you then!

Reading the Internet with Carrie Murphy

2012-10-15T02:47:48Z

As isolated an activity as reading is, as soon as I finished Pretty Tilt - the first collection of poems by Carrie Murphy* from Keyhole Press - I wanted to talk to somebody about it. But first I needed somebody else around me to read the book. As much as I share her feeling that it is nice to dwell in a place where you don't have to be on twenty-four hours a day, I could certainly do for a community that is better versed in brilliant new poetry such as her's. That is where you find me today, having the other week posted a review of Pretty Tilt over at the website of Anobium Books, I continue my campaign here at Very Literary. Presenting, an interview with Carrie Murphy:

Pretty Tilt charts an exit from childhood in a fluid, nonlinear. What's on the horizon isn't very clear or it's being acted out, anticipated, and those dreams and fantasies are mixed in with the densely populated present - the present, in the case of the poems, being teenagerdom. I love that the book really successfully avoids being nostalgic and instead really captures the feeling of slippage that accompanies the weird permanence of those feelings and situations that are just supposed to shut out childhood and give way to adulthood. You capture the continuous sensation of slipping fast, which creates that sentimentality that is part of the dangerous terrain of covering that topic, growing up, but you just put the reader there. That is an achievement.

It's funny that you say it avoids being nostalgic, because in some ways I feel like the book came from SUCH a nostalgic place for me! I'm kind of in the middle of my young adulthood - I'm 26 - and I was looking back at the beginning of my young adulthood with equal parts shame and cringiness and passion and sadness and lots and lots of nostalgia for both how much more simple life felt, but also how much more scarlet-colored it felt, more dramatic and in many ways more vital.

I still love teenage things, in a way that I'm starting to feel might be a problem. Like, I still love and watch teen television shows and movies, and my favorite thing ever is when fictional characters lose their virginities. I just rewatched Dawson's Creek on Netflix and I was just like "Really? Three seasons to actually have sex?" Shows like that are full of such juicy tropes that are also really rooted in truth.

Adolescence is very much a place of liminality and a place of collage. There's a lot of slippage - and pastage, if that can be a word - there, and I'm not sure it ever fully goes away, not even after other parts of our personalities and interests have solidified. And why would we want it to, really?

You write a lot - specifically, you tweet - about living in the Baltimore/DC area. What do you think of that region as a home to a writer? Are there many commercial opportunities to draw on there? Is there a big literary presence, or is it removed from that world? Do you feel that works for or against you as a writer? What do you think of - this isn't good journalism, this is my extravagant bias - the unsustainable model of only LA/NYC being worthwhile creative destinations?

I tweet about DC and Baltimore a lot because I hate living here! That's not completely true - Baltimore is my hometown, and it will forever feel like home to me. But I now live in a suburb of DC, in Northern Virginia, because my boyfriend is getting a PhD here. It feels very wrong to me. DC is completely different from Baltimore. And I went to graduate school in New Mexico and really became transformed into this full-on Westerner, as much as three years of writing poems in the desert can turn you into a Westerner - probably not at all, most of them would say. As much as I'll always love crabcakes and root for the O's, something about the world out there feels right to my soul in a way that the East Coast never will again.

Actually, both Baltimore and DC have great literary scenes. Adam Robinson and Jen Michalski and the Artichoke Haircut guys do awesome things in Baltimore, and Barrelhouse is doing awesome stuff in DC, too. In fact, I help to curate the Three Tents Reading Series with my friend Mark Cugini, an editor of Big Lucks. It's in DC, and it's been great so far. So my dislike of the area has nothing to do with the great writers who live here and who have made it their home!

But I do harbor some resentment for the idea that you're a "real writer" when you live in New York, or San Francisco, or something like that. Especially if you work outside of academia. My time in New Mexico made me realize that big expensive cities are not really places where I want to live, so my perspective is very different, but I also think that there are plenty of worthwhile places to live and work and write here in the United States.

I have this same problem in movies and TV, when the characters always live in NYC or LA. Like, really? Because there are plenty of stories to tell in cities all around this country. I guess it's just the fact that lots of creative people do live in those places, but I don't like the idea that that's what you have to do to "make it" or to be considered legitimate. I like smaller communities, and that includes smaller lit communities. Also I perceive this pressure in NYC to be always going to readings and doing lit scene stuff, and I don't want to be in a lit scene all the time. Some of the time, hell yes! But not always.

I do think the perception of NYC/LA and as "the" places to live if you're a writer is changing a bit. At least I hope so!

I love your food blog Plums in the Icebox, and you also write about health for Blisstree in addition to having Pretty Tilt out - are you into writing regardless of the mode and topic? Do you feel drawn to journalistic writing as much as poetry, or is one mode more important to you than another?

I'm lucky that I have been able to cobble together somewhat of a living writing. I'm still working on the whole actual living part, but I do get paid to write. I am not trained as a journalist at all; in fact, the only thing I am trained in is poetry! So I am taking it as it comes. I love doing my health and food and occasional culture writing because it's fun and interesting, not to mention different. I've been reading the internet forever, but I haven't been writing for the internet forever, so I'm always learning about what to do and how to do it. Plus I can learn about all sorts of stuff that I wonder about, like the best apple pie recipes, restaurants, some female celebrity's workout routine. It's awesome to be able to tie my different interests into my writing.

I find that my poetry is minorly informed by my other writing, but it's taken a bit of a backseat since I began freelancing. I've never been really prolific, but now when I have an idea for a poem I have to make notes right away, or it gets washed away in a sea of my random tweets!

What's your favorite venue you've ever been published in? What's your favorite venue you have yet to conquer?

Good question! And a hard one. I love PANK because it's consistently awesome and because it was one of my first publications when I was in grad school. But I love other journals, too, like NAP which just put out the coolest all-female issue, and Two Serious Ladies, too! My dream of life (actually the past year) is to have a piece of writing published in Rookie Mag. Poem, essay, whatever. And how ironic, because it's an online magazine for teenage girls!

Do you have anything you're doing that you'd like to plug or any project by someone else you'd like to call attention to?

For a project I'd like to call attention to, I love the Runcible Spoon, which is a quirky food zine run by my friend, Malaka Gharib. They published a poem of mine in their most recent issue. Also my friends Mike Meginnis and Tracy Bowling do great work with their journal Uncanny Valley. Another friend, Austin Tremblay, has a poetry and nonfiction journal, Owl Eye Review, which people should also check out. My other friend, Autumn Giles, has a great podcast, Alphabet Soup, where she interviews people about food and writing. If it's totally nepotistic to point out what people I know and like are doing, I will add that I love Autumn Whitefield-Madrano's blog the Beheld: Beauty, and What It Means. There's always so much fascinating stuff to ponder about femininity and looks and feminism over there.

* - For more of Murphy's poetry, do not overlook her chapbook, Meet the Lavendars, available from Birds of Lace Press!

My Heroine: Lovesong for a Blog

2012-09-17T23:07:31Z

For someone hooked up to Thou,
the world may have seemed a kind of half-finished sentence.
- Anne Carson, "the Glass Essay"

Talking about someone, even in a loving way, can be fatiguing, the way receiving good news can still be draining. After experiencing a particularly severe episode of something like Holly Golightly's mean reds, a query of mine was answered promisingly: an editor I admired wanted to see my portfolio. Even this unexpected good news disintegrated me because it meant more work, more lurching towards another person where I was going to be vulnerable and where I would disappoint. Sometimes I feel like this, and reading my favorite books goes a long way towards undoing that feeling, and when it does, I want to shout it from the rooftops. But I want to be direct in explaining the impact of this author's work on me, because it deserves better than fireworks. I want to address specifically my relationship to her work and how the existence of her work has functioned in my life.

Kate Zambreno has a new book coming out this winter from Semiotext(e) called Heroines, a critical memoire, and I am freaking out. She has written two novels that I love, O Fallen Angel (Chiasmus Press, 2010 - also available as an ebook from Dzanc) and Green Girl (Emergency Press, 2011). When I'm talking about books that I want others to read so we can talk about them, so we can reference them surreptitiously, little conspirators of pleasure, I will bring up O Fallen Angel and Green Girl. When I'm talking about holy visions - the mystical and the revelatory - what I want art to do, I talk about Frances Farmer Is My Sister, and I do it in a squealy crazy voice.

In college, in my technically junior year, I committed myself to studying writing, a decision about which I was still of ninety-nine beclouded minds. The literature courses I was inundated with discouraged my affection for reading - my love of books is by no means all-inclusive - and the writing workshops emphasized discipline and unceasing critical interrogation. As necessary and positive every aspect of my time in college turned out to be, I did not find a role model. I did not think I wanted for one until I desperately needed one, when I realized how self-alienatingly serious I was about writing. This decision to study it was motivated in part by my feeling that unlike other forms of art I loved, no writer had accomplished specifically what I wanted to accomplish. But when I devoted myself to it, and bonded to it, and was confronted by so many models that endangered the writing I loved or demonstrated feelings and belief I felt antithetical to making art, it became a high priority that I find someone writing things I felt fiercely about in the face of all this. I became aware of a lot of writers like that: Roxanne Carter, Jojo Lazar, Bhanu Kapil, Kate Durbin, Joanna Ruocco, Roxane Gay, Gina Abelkop. Some of the writers I became aware of had presses through which they published other writers, like Lidia Yuknavitch. Her press, Chiasmus, threw a contest called Undoing the Novel, which was won by Kate Zambreno.

I started reading Frances Farmer Is My Sister. Living alone, experiencing a plague of anxiety attacks, and having the few novels in the literature curriculum I did enjoy ruined by a passive aggressive teaching method that drove my investment in my work into the ground (I am an extremely reactionary student), reading Zambreno's blog was a radiantly sustaining exercise. The form allowed her to build posts - several at a time, more once and again later - on themes and ideas I wanted desperately to read about. And the way she kept circling and dragging back to things - an image I am ripping from her conversation with Kate Durbin today on Twitter, "a woman is dragging her shadow in a circle" (Plath) - that was exactly how I was reading, too: beclouded and corralled. She pointed me in the direction of so many writers - Anne Carson, Anna Kavan - whose work kept me together as I was trying to complete coursework. My affairs after graduation were enough to consume me with unseamly spiritual paralysis, but I was also worried about art: I wanted to make it, and I was going to have to be okay enough to pay my student loans back, develop a career, and write. In school, I was urged to disregard every pressure that was not to be a better writer, and this included being vigilant about works that did not advance and challenge one's relationship to one's art. One of the nicest things anyone has ever said about me, which is nearer to my heart than anything I list on my resume, was in a discussion about interviews given by writers in the Paris Review. One classmate read Dorothy Parker's interview and said she sounded just like me. Our professor agreed and asked her if she thought Parker's poetry was anything more than clever and if she really needed it in her reading life. I thought of how a year before, when the few relationships I had made disintegrated in my being placed in physical danger and abandoned, and with no support I had to relocate myself and accomodate the significant time it took to avoid making the situation worse, having Dorothy Parker's "Sanctuary" in my head at all times made things bearable.

Not only did reading Frances Farmer Is My Sister make me feel better about how the work of certain writers makes me feel better, but Zambreno makes observations that have real, powerful implications for writers while also expressing doubt, anxiety, and extreme fear and vulnerability that is reassuring and terrifying in someone whose ideas are so urgent and vital. Doing what is most necessary is usually the worst and that is why nobody else has done it. When I became aware that people living, now, today, are writing things that are as and even more important than the books I grew up loving, and that I am lucky enough to have become familiar with those writers through their internet presences - blogs, Twitter accounts, hyper-current interviews - I still encountered a lot of endless streams of accomplishments and good fortune that did not really speak to the fact that behind those things is work. I have a flashbulb memory of the first time I read Zambreno's blog and realized her writing meant something significant to me, when referencing Maggie Nelson's Bluets and a recent failure to meet a deadline she thought of BLEW-ITS and not a day passes when I do not need to think of BLEW-ITS. I can do with one comparison to a Paris Review-vested poet, I need the gift of BLEW-ITS every day. Like I am nothing else I am honored to be Kate Zambreno's reader.

See also:
Kate Zambreno in conversation with Kate Durbin at Her Kind
Kate Zambreno in conversation with Edith Zimmerman at the Hairpin
Kate Zambreno is asked: What is Experimental Literature? at HTMLGIANT (older but tremendously worth it, as are the rest in this series of interviews)

Look at this Amazing Thing my Friend is Doing: Kristen Stone Edition

2012-08-21T05:20:37Z

I'm talking about

Hatched just after New Years, Unthinkable Creatures has been but one way that Kristen Stone has staggered me all over two-thousand and twelve. This summer saw the release of her first book, Domestication Handbook, from Rogue Factorial.

I am getting ahead of myself because I want to talk about the book. Even though my intention is to recognize what tremendousness Kristen Stone has achieved in putting out such incredible and tenderly produced work on Unthinkable Creatures, I must preface my statements by acknowledging that this is no unbiased review. For the most part, I have enjoyed being stunned and pinned and punished by work that has compelled me to seek out the author and, at the very least, keep track of what they're working on next. But Kristen Stone and I, although we met online through mutual connections with other writers, started out talking. She invited me to be the latest installment of Unthinkable Creatures, but that is the last I want to speak of my involvement, because I tell you: my chapbook, the Black Telephone, is for sale now, but everything I'm going to tell you about is much better.

The premiere Unthinkable Creatures title was i love crushes more than real things, a collaboration between Kristen Stone herself and Maureen Murtha. I know I said I would not bring up my book again, but something i love crushes and the Black Telephone have in common that I love dearly is the manner in which the text is arranged, cut and fastened and superimposed to the blank or photocopied background. The process of pagination can be disorienting and can inject a disembodied, out-of-control feeling to the making of a book, which should be intimate, you probably feel, if you are me. I could not imagine just leaving these words to sync up in geometric strategies, I would have to push them together:

Like I push them at you instead of typing them.

I know I said I was through with talking about myself, but I do hope my sense of this being utopian is infectious: somebody in Gainesville, Florida, is doing work that astounds me, and I get to be in on it - even as a fan, even more than that.

Write, Dad by Kristen E. Nelson was next, and while I was on board for anything, I could not have anticipated the continuous shiver of reading this book, with its static-stricken photo on the cover. I opened it after a long work week and, tearing it out of its package, I opened to the line that read "your honesty has duration." My curious partner handled it and observed the old labelmaker title on the cover. He handed it back to me and said, smiling, "That will fade, don't forget what it says."

I had all ready wrapped up writing the Black Telephone when the next title, Oliver Bendorf and Selena Clare's the Flying Unicycle: a Queer Adventurestory came to me. This I will be pirating, quoting, and otherwise propelling into the arms of everyone I'll ever meet because of everyone I've met who should have had a book like this as early as the Hungry Caterpillar. I'm not saying that because, it being illustrated, it is exactly suited for children, or because it shoulders complicated concepts on the kind of unfetteredness that can only be achieved by being a real poet, but because things like this should be in one's head, reducable, in crisis, if anything, to love. The plot: a child escapes stress on a magical unicycle to a party in the forest. "Sappho," the frog croaked. "Love it, learn it!"

All of this and I am omitting the fact that each of these are hand-crafted, variously painted, threaded, handled with skin. Not to diminish that fevermouth of a hellswamp that is the Florida climate, but I have a walking commute, and between the weather we have had and my just-finished reading of John Jeremiah Sullivan's Pulphead, wherein he recounts Andrew Lytle calling him beloved, I thought: by virtue of the weather, all things must be a little more intimate in the South.

All of this - I meant to say before I had to mention the physical - while Kristen Stone is reading my essay. I am not a writer of essays. I do not think of them as I think of blogs, where I put on voices. I think of them as contributing to a conversation a step beyond a comment thread, of being graded, of backing up my feelings with cited sources. I let this insecurity infiltrate the essay. Meanwhile, I received Kristen Stone's Domestication Handbook in the mail. Between her editing the Black Telephone and many, many emails only tangentially related, I don't think I have mentioned to her reading the book, which I have done twice. My response to her last email is still in draft form, since I started going off the rails in response to her disappointment in Sheila Heti's How Should a Person Be? which she and I both just finished. Both How Should a Person Be? and Domestication Handbook are concerned with guidance. HSAPB? is the story of one seeking guidance. DH is the positing of, juxtaposing means of, confrontation with, and hymn with guidance, the idea of being led: into camera bags in closets and holes in the yard and the condensation across somebody's skin. The thing that disappointed me in Heti's book is how it seems the alternative to determining, ultimately, how a person should be, is graphic, scatalogical misery, while Stone is up for exploring the very notion of how we behave with constraints, with contours. Domestication is a rigid concept, and yet Kristen's book contains a spectrum while Heti's book diminishes to a focused duel between doing it wrong and doing it right, however unclear that may be. Remember not to take me seriously, though. Like the characters in Heti's book, I could not judge Kristen in an Ugly Painting Contest, but I am confident even just "Investment mission" could highjack any reader's senses and enrapture them unfailingly:

I wake in corn country to hundreds of millions of potential consumers. I wake next to the neighbor's soybeans, to a booming middle class.

I am too happy to impart tell of Kristen Stone's stunningness here on Very Literary and hope wayfaring Googlers will join me again soon for more enthusiasm.

Wayfaring strangers IRL can actually, physically join me at the Midtown Scholar on Saturday, August 25, between 2 and 4pm, where I will be reading and yammering about some of these same things, but with nervous gesticulations.

(Poster art by Kara Sheaffer, a forthcoming subject of such a post as this.)

Very Twitterary

2012-07-31T06:05:35Z

Organized vaguely by genre, this installment of Very Literary celebrates writers on Twitter. Inside 140 characters, one's Twitter is best suited as a point of departure for other sites where a more thorough demonstrations of one's talents can stretch and yawn and relax. But Twitter pulsates, and I am grateful to have become fans of certain writers from their tweets alone. By whatever means!

For the most part, this very small list excludes the Twitter accounts of presses and journals and focuses exclusively on the accounts of writers and editors who not only post links to their incredible work, but make Twitter itself worth dwelling on for socially unacceptable stretches of time.

POETS
Gabby Gabby @seemstween - "how much would i have to pay u ppl to get u to periodically tweet @ me good job. keep going."
Carina Finn @carinafinn - "I'm going to write a novella in which Martin Sheen runs for president with the caveat that Aaron Sorkin makes all of his decisions."
Rohin Guha @ohrohin - "Rohin "Based On An Idea By The Spice Girls" Guha"
Niina Pollari @heartbarf - "Rohin Guha is trying to tell me about Sailor Moon feminism."
Nalini Abhiraman @_nalini_- "comes a point during a move where putting on beyonce feels like a liturgical thing"

NONFICTION WRITERS /JOURNALISTS
Charlotte Shane @charlottenb - "It's unfair that I don't have a regular job and yet Mondays are still terrible."
Jane Hu @hujane - "I'm just a girl, sitting in front of a blog, asking it to love her."
Autumn Whitefield-Madrano @the_beheld - "Why are such a high percentage of trolls evo-psych enthusiasts?"
Lesley Kinzel @52stations - "IT HAPPENED TO ME: I GOT FAT-SHAMED BY MY XBOX."
Litsa Dremousis @litsadremousis - "Prime Ministers for Greece & Italy have resigned this month due, basically, to general lunacy. Hey, guys: PennState needs a new president."

PROSE WRITERS
Kate Zambreno @daughteroffury - "Up-and-coming novelist gets up-and-coming biographer to pen his Wikipedia page."
Roxane Gay @rgay - "My hairline screams, GRANDMOTHER."
Masha Tupitsyn @lifeasweshowit - "Ron Howard: "TV is becoming literature." Yikes."
Amelia Gray @grayamelia - "I need a Winn Dixie grocery bag full of girls becoming their mothers right now to the VIP section"
Kristine Ong Muslim @kristinemuslim - "The protag is a Kanye-like character. He's got flash and metallic jewelry. On Chapter 2, a giant magnet ensnares him."

EDITORS
Natalie Jacoby @nataliejacoby (who is no longer an editor, but still has my favorite Twitter) - "all i do at work i lisen 2 hiphop w mine earbuds & printout blank sheets of papey & look for college credit internships even tho i graduated"
Mairead Case @maireadcase - "in which idora park calls on the new york times to better represent trans people in its pages, kerpow kerpow"
Lauren Sphorer @lornasore - "The best part of that game Draw Something is watching people struggle to spell"
Sadie Stein @sadiestein - "Spinach gnocchi disaster last night. Green-flecked hilarity ensued! We laughed and laughed. Hahaha. Haha. Oh, and I was by myself."
Ann Friedman @annfriedman - "Journalists! The details of your incompetence DO interest me."

LOL
Indie Author Hulk @indieauthorhulk - "DEAR AGENT: THE MOST POPULAR TRENDS IN PUBLISHING TODAY ARE DYSTOPIAN YA NOVELS AND KINKY EROTICA. THE BOOK I'M SUBMITTING IS BOTH."
Joey Comeau @joeycomeau - "I hope I never get pregnant with spiders."

On Chapbooks, Part Two

2012-07-17T05:09:45Z

I have not amassed chapbboks bindly: my love of them developed between graduating from college and looking for a job. Even though a part of the attraction is their comparable cheapness, the chapbooks in my possession came to me on their own individual terms. Each one I accumulate demonstrates another facet of my affection for books as physical objects. In the last (proper) installment of Very Literary, I discussed my introduction to chapbooks, and here I would like to maneuver the spotlight onto more titles that have cemented my love of the form.

Joanna Howard's In the Colorless Round, with illustrations by Rikki Ducornet, was a 2006 release from Noemi Press. Squat and bolted, ten tiny episodes of Howard's dapper horrors are accompanied by illustrations by Ducornet with the same unsettling blend of the vague and the exaggerated.

Paradigm Press' 2000 print of Rosmarie Waldrop's Shorter American Memory came to my attention in a Poetry Foundation podcast for which I am very grateful - there's scant information about it online (my primary means of becoming aware of anything) but there is this excerpt - "Shorter American Memory of the Declaration of Independence" - on the Poetry Foundation's website. This modest, saddle-stitched chapbook with a uniform stamp at the top of each poem enticed me to purchase it because I had encountered a great deal of chapbooks by budding writers, amassing pieces into larger work or casting a spotlight on an ongoing project to promote its forthcoming publication. Rosmarie Walrop is a very accomplished poet, and for one with such a staggering ouevre, a slim selection focused on a single - and singularly handled - theme was the perfect proper introduction to her work.

Before I read the Cabinet of What You Don't See by Tantra Bensko, from ISMs Press, 2011, I contacted Tantra about attending a conference in San Diego, &Now: Tomorrowland Forever! Between our planning the trip and meeting up in California, I became an Assistant Editor with ISMs, having also been an author of editor Rachel Kendall's via her journal, Sein und Werden. Tantra's Cabinet is an assortment, an appropriate term for a lot of chabooks, which serve - if they are not necessarily intended - to be a sampling of work, since its components are to small and do not last for such a duration as to become immersive. But even in the glints, which are surreal not in the way of existing in a loosely defined reality, but warped by the force of the telling, even in their smallness, the warmth of Tantra's voice pervades, and each outrageous observation is borne of a wisdom that comes from love, which is totally inimitable.

The Belladonna* Collaborative's 2011 release, its hundred and twenty-seventh, of Bhanu Kapil's (a poem essay, or precursor: NOTES: for a novel: Ban en Banlieues) is a pamphlet-like promotional tool for a PROSE EVENT, curated by Kate Zambreno for the Collaborative. Belladonna* promotes the work of women writers, and their "chaplets" are under $5. Thanks to this - and their irresistable catalog - I own several, but I want to call attention to Kapil's because I love her relentless interrogation of process. All her work is so intimate, even as it experiences so much ambivalence within itself, and the image around which "Ban" is based - an Indian girl, lying down on the sidewalk, a race riot coming up fast - is arresting. In my eagerness for the whole book, I devoured this pamphlet.

E! Entertainment by Kate Durbin, which came out on Insert Press in 2011, of which I have number 8 of 50, has a blurb from a reality TV star and a section on Anna Nicole Smith, and if I wasn't a serious fan of Durbin's - whose observation about chapbooks can be read in the previous installment of Very Literary - I would have to have this little book. Saddle-stitched, white, it is deceptively simple-looking, and I appreciate nothing interfering with the text. To have Durbin's stern eyes and intense, level voice present in the experience of the work, at least in the mind, adds to E! not as a piece of writing but as a text that is a layer of reality, with its source and its audience as important as its content.

Joyelle McSweeney's the Necropastoral, from Spork Press, 2011, was bound with "gloom, goth, ghosts, smoke, & trees" and now relies on my embrace for its structural integrity. The design of this book and the contents of this book are bandying a call-and-response about their own brilliance that I am lucky to happen to see. McSweeney is another writer, like Waldrop, whose work I admired but wanted to be introduced to in some form that would not struggle against the profound weariness I generate like a little cyclone throwing myself very hard into work and very hard into rest.

The Pastoral, like the occult, has always been a fraud, a counterfeit, an invention, an anachronism. However, as with the occult, and as with Art itself, the fraudulence of the pastoral is in direct proportion to its uncanny powers.

I could say the book is made of a small essay, a sequence of poems, and an effigy. I could say the back is debossed. No mere description captures this book that omits the Warholesque Eazy E pattern on the inside covers: a stroke of total genius.

In this heat, even an unassuming chapbook might be too much to handle, but that doesn't mean one should foresake good writing in order to avoid sunstroke. In the next installment of Very Literary, I will be navigating literary Twitter feeds because the Internet constantly has to be written.

Writer's Retreat

2012-07-02T06:40:15Z

The heat is unbreathable and my internet connection is a tease - for the past month I have yielded to both, but I have not been totally incapacitated. While I regain my bearings and get ready to post the second part of my treatise on chapbooks, I have news to announce!

This Sunday, July 8th, I'll be reading at the Moonstone Arts Center in Philadelphia - 110 S 13th Street - as part of the Jubilant Thicket Literary Series. I have a lot to celebrate at my first public reading: this year I have three chapbooks coming out. In addition to Say you're a fiction, a series of poems coming soon from Kristy Bowen's Dancing Girl Press, this week sees the release of the Black Telephone, an essay by me and release number four in Kristen Stone's Unthinkable Creatures chapbook series!

The third is a dynamite secret about which I am totally exploding. I should be able to unveil everything by end of the summer, when I read at the Midtown Scholar on August 25th! Those readers who have never had the pleasure of handling a chapbook will get to do so then. I warn you that it isn't an experience for the faint of heart: the glitter content might push you over the edge.

After Jubilant Thicket next Sunday and armed with an oscillating fan, Very Literary will resume as usual. In the meantime, check out the New Inquiry - whose sixth issue, "Attack of the Drones," launches this week! Ilk journal is now reading submissions for its fifth issue to feature exclusively women. And, speaking of which, Jezebel recently corralled twenty-five kick-ass and amazing women including the incomparable Kate Zambreno and Sheila Heti. Careful not to damage a copy of Green Girl under the fireworks!

On Chapbooks

2012-05-22T06:22:32Z

Alissa Nutting: Aside from (I assume, perhaps incorrectly) length, what do you feel like the other boundaries of the chapbook are? And let’s make this a double-header ending and engage that second part as well: is there a way a 400-page document would be more chapbook than not, could retain the essence-ness of a chapbook?

Kate Durbin: I think a chapbook’s restrictions are mostly related to length, number, and distribution, as well as how seriously the form is taken (not as seriously as perfect bound books, which of course have their own hierarchy depending on publishers, etc). Writing something as ephemeral as a chapbook can give you enormous freedom to play and experiment. I think it’s possible to create a 400-page document that has the essence of playfulness in a chapbook. Forms are just things we made up to help us categorize the world, anyway. You really can do whatever you want.

- from Alissa Nutting's conversation with Kate Durbin during Chapbook Week at the Offending Adam

(Featured photo from the wonderful Hyacinth Girl Press)

When I was in college, a friend of mine was contacted about an internship with a small press. He was too busy, but he recommended me, and it's one of my favorite things that ever happened to me. Ron Mohring was adjuncting at the college I attended and endeavoring to kick his small press, Seven Kitchens, into production schedule overdrive with the help of some committed interns. I was not familiar at the time with what a small press constituted or what exactly we were making. Chapbooks are small, handmade books (handsewn in the case of 7K), roughly a quarter of the length of most conventional books. Occasionally they are, that is, and that is what Seven Kitchens makes.

Erin Bertram's chapbook, Inland Sea, was the first one I was in charge with from beginning to end. The cover photo is by Kris Sanford, whose photography inspired the poems. Bertram had also used a photo of Sanford's on the cover of her previous chapbook, Alluvium, published by Dancing Girl Press in 2007. After reading Ron's copy of Alluvium, I looked Dancing Girl Press up online and decided if I was ever going to amble down poetry's alleyway, this is where I would like to end up: in the company of Bertram, Kate Durbin, and the vast number of incredible women Kristy Bowen has published with remarkable consideration for their individual voices since 2004.

Chicago, IL's Dancing Girl Press - open to submissions as we speak! - puts out annually a sizable number of little saddle-stitched (that is, stapled) books of poetry by women, between twelve and thirty-two pages per manuscript. Among my favorite of her titles has been 2011's Trollops in Love by Gina Abelkop. Twenty-one poems of loathing those closest to you, navigating the begrudging solidarity between girls when one humiliates the other, fan worship, and all the weird shapes ardent young-womanhood takes - at seven dollars, this fine little object gives the reader the perfect impression of everything Gina Abelkop is capable of, leaving you prone to the shock that she has accomplished that much more in the poetry she has written and the force that she is in bringing brilliant new writing to the attention of others with her own press, Birds of Lace.

Based in Berkeley, CA, Birds of Lace adheres to whims and not to any strict production schedule, allowing Abelkop to focus fully on whatever project demands her attention. The chapbooks this discernment yields, by writers so individually powerful I have to name them, such is my admiration for Christine Vi-Van Nguyen, Niina Pollari, Rohin Guha, Jackie Wang, Kristina Marie Darling, Leon Baham, and Carrie Murphy, are so distinct and visually fetching, not only are they vessels of some of the best poetry being published to day (definitely, absolutely the most fun) they were also the subject of a post on the ModCloth Blog (along with Dancing Girl Press and Blood Pudding Press). Perhaps a Girl Elsewhere by Adam Strauss, a title from 2011, is saddle-stitched and slim at twenty pages - an easily assembled little book, you might say, but between the vibrant green pages and elegant typography, individually stamped inside cover, and - as ever - the sheer quality of the poems within, the consideration of this little book as an object of value is unmissable.

At the end of 2010, Ron and I went to Pittsburgh's annual Small Press Festival to have our minds blown by all that passion concentrated on two unbearably humid floors of an artspace in October. There I had the delirious and ill-contained pleasure of "meeting" the editors of Greying Ghost Press and Caketrain Press (bumbled is a more honest description), two of my favorite things happening in the world. They are also two excellent examples of what disparate directions one can take chapbook production.

Among the many Caketrain titles I was swayed by, afterpastures by Claire Hero was the one reinforced by a recommendation from Ron, whose editorial eye I trust. Caketrain's chapbooks are released according to annual contests that alternate fiction and poetry every other year. 2007's prize went to Hero's poetry. Caketrain's titles are perfectly bound - the variety of binding most people are used to, with neatly folded stacks of paper pressed into each other, belying the wild images within. This method of binding enables Caketrain chapbooks to span forty to eighty pages.

I wish I could remember what I traded in order to own the Tornado is Not a Surrealist by Brian Foley, from Greying Ghost Press. From 2008, number eleven of seventy-five is mine, and the poem "Ahem" is committed to memory. Although it isn't as representative of the paper ephemera that makes Greying Ghost titles so relentlessly stunning, it reinforces that beneath the special moves allowed by cheapness of production and the intimacy of a run of only seventy-five, publications of any sort are about being a vessel.

Once I was fully opened to the phenomenon of the chapbook, my affection for the "form" has intensified, and it is the tiny books that stand out to me as stars that I will discuss in the next installment of Very Literary.

Small Publishing Today

2012-05-01T19:53:15Z

As stated, my intention here at Very Literary is to bring you news of small and regional publishers and writers. What distinguishes a small from a big publisher might elude the casual patron of Barnes & Noble. You might be under the impression that the only way small publishers can get a book into a gigantic national chain is by sneaking in and wedging copies away in the literary anthology section, where they are sure to never be seen by employees.

When I say small publishers, I am referring to anyone who is not the Big Six:

HarperCollins
Hachette
Random House
Penguin
Simon & Schuster
Macmillan

That said, each of these groups has, over time, absorbed smaller houses as imprints. Penguin has Riverhead, Viking, Dutton, and Plume. HarperCollins has, Avon, Ecco, and William Morrow. Hachette has Little, Brown. Random House has Knopf, Vintage, and Anchor. Simon & Schuster has Scribner and the Free Press. Macmillan has Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Henry Holt, Picador, and the St. Martin's Press.

Each of these groups has tremendous publicity muscle and significantly greater financial and human resources than many small presses. They can afford their authors tidy advances and launch them on funded book tours. They also deal exclusively with agented writers. Although it is possible for a piece of writing to be submitted successfully to an agent who submits it successfully to a big house, such lucky strikes are the exception, not the norm.

And what Very Literary is out to do is to champion the fact that that is no statistic to feel grim about, because beyond the Big Six, a lot of people are engaging in a lot of innovative, exciting moves in publishing, and they're doing it for love, connecting directly with writers to connect directly with readers in ways that invigorate old practices and make exemplary use of the new.

Some small presses have prestigious legacies. Dalkey Archive, initially unaffiliated but based lately out of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champagne, is dedicated to keeping all titles it takes on in print and are one of the greatest champions of translated literature. City Lights, borne of the beat poets, maintains the production of seminal poetry titles by its founding inspirations as well as new authors. Grove Press, which has since merged with the Atlantic Monthly Press, endured obscenity trials as it dared to put out some of the most challenging literature that remains, thanks to its effort, readily available and recognized for its greatness today. And New Directions, whose chic stark black and white covers are slowly being turned into color with the punch and grandeur of hybrid roses, styled but beguiling as nature. For their catalog and panache, they are my fantasy.

Notable Authors: Rikki Ducornet and Ann Quinn (Dalkey Archive), Allen Ginsberg (City Lights), Dennis Cooper and William S. Burroughs (Grove), Clarice Lispector and Anne Carson (New Directions)

Many university presses are dedicated to purely academic fare, but some are fiercely dedicated to important, trailblazing work at the intersection of literature and criticism. CUNY's the Feminist Press is a total revelation - every title of theirs is sharp and the voices are brilliantly varied. The University of Minnesota Press doesn't have a swank name, but they don't have to tell you they are great, they will show you. The University of Alabama's FC2 - Fiction Collective 2 - hosts two contests annually to spotlight emerging and mid-career writers and have therefore enabled some of the greatest contemporary talents to flourish. MIT's Semiotext(e), concieved to bring "French Theory" to the US has persisted, with their Native and Active Agents series, to bring some of the most game-changing work avaliable today to print.

Notable Authors: Virginie Despentes and Lesley Kinzel (the Feminist Press), Christopher Isherwood and Philip K. Dick (U Minnesota Press), Lidia Yuknavitch and Lucy Corin (FC2), Kate Zambreno and Masha Tupitsyn (Semiotext[e]).

Heavy-hitting editorial power, towering alumni, and impeccable design sense define strongly branded presses deeply rooted in artistic denizens - Melville House and Akashic in New York, Counterpoint and McSweeney's in California. Melville House was inspired to action by 9/11 and with its bold solid colors and sans-serif fonts, it follows the example set by the French New Wave and American Apparal: unfettered and urgent. Akashic comes off at once raw and swaggering, and with titles programmed by the likes of Dennis Cooper and Chris Abani, their production schedule pushes literature forward at a rate unmatched by focusing on newer talent. Counterpoint was created when Publisher's Group West folded and its holdings were assumed by the Perseus book group. Right now Counterpoint is home to its own coterie of titanic publications, but it is close to my heart for pumping blood into the heart of Soft Skull, a New York institution now located in Berkeley. McSweeney's has become titanic since its scrappy beginnings in the late nineties - it is distinguished from the other publishing houses in this and the tiers above because periodicals are central to its structure: many authors are introduced to the attention of editors via McSweeney's Internet Tendency, an oft-updated online magazine, and Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, a print publication that has appeared as a full-color newspaper, a set of three hardback books, and many other guises of radiant design. This is to say nothing of the nonprofit 826 empire or the Believer, McSweeney's more conventional (even that estimation is incorrect) illustration-heavy magazine of interviews and essays. McSweeney's straddles the line between big and small presses, but for its dynamicism, there is nothing else out there that resembles it.

Notable Authors: Tao Lin (Melville House), Kate Durbin and Lonely Christopher (Akashic), Carole Maso and J. Eric Miller (Counterpoint/Soft Skull), Lydia Davis and Robert Coover (McSweeney's)

Newer and with no less lofty ambitions, there are a fleet of presses using contemporary technology and keen discernment to hook the best new writers up with the soundest means of getting their books to potential readers. Dzanc, Caketrain, Keyhole, Aqueous, Ellipsis, Tarpaulin Sky - these are where the focus of Very Literary will lie most centrally. A distinguishing characteristic of these presses is lack of affiliation with a particular institution as well as their periodical incarnations. These let them remain aware of new writers while production schedules for books enable them to forge a more intimate working relationship with writers they deem very significant and in keeping with their vision. Presses like Jaded Ibis and Featherproof stick primarily to putting out books, but their authors and editors are active within a vibrant community of small publishing where there is no shortage of opportunities to make one's self visible to these passionate publishers

Notable Authors: Jac Jemc (Dzanc), Roxanne Carter (Jaded Ibis), Sarah Rose Etter (Caketrain), Carrie Murphy (Keyhole), Amelia Gray (Featherproof), Meghan Lamb (Aqueous), Joanna Ruocco (Ellipses), Joyelle McSweeney (Tarpaulin Sky)

Small publishing vitally involves literary periodicals such as the ones put out by houses - Dzanc's monthly Collagist, Caketrain's annual, the irregularly epic Tarpaulin Sky journal - but there are journals that have remained strictly focused on being just that, and for it they have flourished. Some enduring giants still represent the best of what's out there today, and the cheapest, fastest means by which to gain exposure to it. Between Poetry Magazine, the Paris Review, and Ploughshares, the smallness of these efforts is continuously called into question. Their force in the shaping of literature is tremendous.

Other literary periodicals endeavor to give writers a considerate platform for their work without investing in print and experiencing the hurdle of how to get the work in front of readers. Some journals have embraced the internet exclusively and thrive beyond its trappings - there is nothing of lesser quality on sites like La Petite Zine, Two Serious Ladies, and Dear Navigator, versus anything in ink today. Snappy, clean, and luscious - each experiment with formatting work for the screen and deliver intimidatingly accomplished work with modern immediacy.

Also thriving wildly in the realm of small presses is the art of the handmade book. Chapbooks - tiny, crafted books, smaller in scale than full-length novels and collections - are the province of presses like Greying Ghost, Horse Less Press, and Unthinkable Creatures. On an intimate scale, the quality of the writing is reflected in not only the beauty of the design, but the care of the editors who use paper ephemera, stamps, and hand-stitching to reinforce the fact that what we're dealing with is art. They are also inexpensive and stylish!

All this, and how it is represented in the capital area, will be focused on minutely in the posts to come.

You're a writer!

2012-04-22T21:22:45Z

"You're a writer! You know, I've written 500 poems. They're all in bags. Somewhere. Oh, darling, I've been through the most horrible things in the world. But you can't tell Americans that. They're used to lots of money and everything being great. And in America you're not supposed to live with your parents." - Edie Beale, Grey Gardens

The literary world might strike one as being too great an expenditure of time and resources to participate in or keep up with - but now, reader, you have the solution to that. I'm going to bring it to you for free. Here in, on, or at - however you prefer to inhabit the internet - witf's Very Literary, links, notices and spotlit gazes will keep you abreast of new writing and goings-on inside small and regional publishing.

To begin, beginnings: you might think that the presence of eReaders, whose ominousness has bloated to include collusive activity, would put a frustrated halt on an atrophying industry, but new publishing efforts are gathering steam from the abundance of talent and zeal that can unite - thanks to the internet - to overcome the sad and the weird. The LA Review of Books just unveiled their grand re-launch that demonstrates their commitment to resuscitating the art of the review in some of the swankest HTML out there. Apt, since last week, the Paris Review had their Spring Revel, where the New York Review of Books - particularly founding editor Robert Silvers - was honored for galvanizing the form in 1963, during a publishing strike. A lot has changed since then of course, as the Awl explored this week in its examination of aspiring writers' New York City rents then and now. A character like Edie Beale might not have the financial clout to tough it out in NYC today, but she might find a fervor for her work on tumblr. We've got the time and space to think about all of that in the coming months of course, we're not running a tab.

Welcome to Very Literary.