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Cameron's (Eric Silva / Flickr)

The following post is part of our online companion to our Spring 2013 issue on The Business of Literature. Click here for an overview of the issue.

——

When I needed an article from the February 1963 issue of the defunct travel magazine Holiday, I never questioned where to search for it. I picked up the phone and dialed. “Cameron’s,” said the voice on the other end.

Always afraid of saying something stupid and offending the store’s gruff owner, Jeff Frase, I described the item I needed in as few words as possible. In his dry, distant growl, Frase said, “One minute. Let me check.” He sounded annoyed. He put down the phone. When he returned moments later, he said, “Yeah, we have it.” How much? “Five dollars.”

Back in its heyday, big names wrote for Holiday: Steinbeck, Kerouac, Hemingway, Michener. Holiday was the magazine that commissioned E. B. White’s famous 7,500-word essay, “Here Is New York,” in 1948, an essay later published as a best-selling book. It still stands as some of the best prose on one of the world’s most written-about cities.

Five dollars was a bargain. I asked if I could pick up the magazine on Saturday since I worked all week. Frase said, “It’ll be under the counter in the hold box, under your name.”

Founded by a stamp collector named Robert Cameron in 1938, Cameron’s Books and Magazines is Portland, Oregon’s oldest used bookstore, and it’s one of the largest vintage magazine dealers in America. Cameron’s might be the largest. When asked for the store’s size, Frase said, “Oh, I don’t know. We could eyeball it, but—” He squinted and leaned forward against the counter. “Maybe forty to eighty foot wide at least, about twice that deep. That’s just the front room. There’s the upstairs.” He waved a finger overhead, tracing the seam where the ceiling meets the south wall. A long passage runs there, its dusty wooden boards lined with mid-century crime, sci-fi, and romance mass markets. He pointed to the room behind him. “And then there’s the magazines.”

How many magazines does he have?

“I really couldn’t say. I just usually tell people ‘Thousands and thousands.’” He stood with his arms crossed behind the cash register. “It’s a real niche market.”

Cameron's (Flickr / Sturgill)

There aren’t many stores left like his. A major one still exists in Skokie, Illinois, on the outskirts of Chicago, called Magazine Museum, formerly called Magazine Memories in Morton Grove. They have about 140,000 magazines, one from as far back as 1576. “They used to buy from me,” Frase said. “If they got an order that they couldn’t fill, they’d buy what I had and sell it to the customers. I’m sure he’s got a website. If not, he’s got a real long—what do you call it—message machine, message on his message machine thing.”

There was a store in Southeast Portland called Periodicals Paradise. They started on Belmont Boulevard, moved to Powell Boulevard, then to Hawthorne Boulevard, and then closed in 2006. They opened up again in a new location in the city’s Hollywood District in 2007, but cut their vintage magazine stock in half. Keeping twenty to forty issues of Life in-store got too expensive. Instead, they started stocking about two issues and keeping the rest in storage.

Cameron’s is what some people call a hole in the wall. To many, it bears all the markings peculiar to the used bookstore species: cramped space, sweet musty smell, stock arranged in an idiosyncratic but functional system that sometimes confuses customers, with codes of conduct on handwritten signs taped to shelves and endcaps. One sign says, “No cell phone cacophony allowed.” Another, written by Frase’s daughter when she was seven, says, “Put away books are happy books.” All of which is to say that Cameron’s offers everything you want in a used bookstore: fair prices, individuality, as well as the books you came for and the books you didn’t expect to find. Very little has changed about Cameron’s over the years, except the luster of the paint. Frase affixes price tags to books by hand and doesn’t manage inventory with a computer.

Despite the rich assortment of general fiction, nonfiction, and vintage paperbacks, it’s the magazines that distinguish the store. Current back-issue titles such as Travel + Leisure and Popular Mechanics are displayed upfront, and a staggering selection of collectible magazines in back. Everything from Life to Look to the Saturday Evening Post, shelved alongside titles you didn’t know or had forgotten existed, such as Argosy, American Boy, and Premiere. Many reside inside protective, plastic sleeves. To access the vintage magazine room, you have to ask permission. “Collier’s magazine?” he’ll say in response to your inquiry. “Yeah, we have a few. Over here.” Then he’ll lead you under a “No Admittance” sign, through a doorway beside the cash register.

As independent bookstores come and go across the country and others become specialized to stay solvent, Cameron’s endures. The question is how. Are vintage magazine collectors numerous enough and sufficiently loose with their money to cover the store’s rent? Who’s buying used and vintage magazines anyway?

On that February day, I was.

I’d called Cameron’s because I was writing an essay about Miles Davis and needed a relevant article I’d spotted in a bibliography. The article was in Holiday. Unlike most modern glossies, Holiday hadn’t been digitized. To access content, I needed the original copy, which made me wonder: with countless titles like The New Yorker digitizing their archives, how did that affect the used magazine market? Do many people visit the store looking for magazines that haven’t been digitized, such as Holiday?

“Not many people ask for Holiday,” Frase said. “It’s only actually until recently that I ever bothered carrying it, because I fell heir to a couple of batches of them and decided to give it a shot. I’ve kind of looked through a couple of them. A lot of times, they’ll devote most of a whole issue to a certain locale—I’ve seen issues on Oregon and San Francisco—so I thought someone potentially might want those. So you put ’em out there and hope someone asks.” I did.

Turns out, I wasn’t the normal vintage magazine customer. Most of Frase’s customers buy vintage magazines as novelties and birthday gifts. They find an issue from around the date of a person’s birth, and mail it to them. They’re what some in the trade call “birthday issues.” These customers are regular people, not a collecting subculture. “And it tends to be sort of middle-class, middle-age, well-dressed people that are just looking,” Frase said, “you know, lookin’ for that gift that they can’t get anywhere else.”

Over the years, he’s learned to spot these customers. “You can tell,” he said. “What they’ll say is, ‘How close can we get to April 14th, 1952?’ or something like that, and then I’ll go check for ’em. First thing I ask is, ‘Is it for a man or a woman?’ because that sort of narrows down what I will show ’em.” Some ask for a particular magazine, like Life or Esquire, for their birthday issue, while others just focus on the issue date. The recipients love it. “Feedback I get, usually, is they love the ads and photos in them, love a lot of the articles, especially if you get someone that was born during the war years.”

The original owner of Cameron’s, Mr. Cameron, didn’t sell magazines. The store’s second owner, Fred Goetz, added the vintage stock in the 1970s. “Just seemed to be a market that no one else was dealing with locally at the time,” Frase said. So Goetz added them to diversify his stock and add another revenue stream. When Goetz hired 30-year-old Frase as a part-time shelving clerk in 1982, he had already built the catwalk and shelving system in the backroom and was filling it with a growing assortment of vintage titles purchased from walk-in customers and estates. So Frase spent the next thirty years growing stock, building more shelves, and discontinuing certain titles while adding others.

Even though it was good business, Goetz’s decision to sell vintage wasn’t entirely financial. “He would pull out a Life magazine almost every lunchtime and spend a few minutes looking through it, then put a little ‘LA’ on the cover in pencil so he knew he’d already looked at that issue.” ‘LA’ stood for ‘looked at.’ He wouldn’t bother erasing the mark when someone bought the magazine. “It was so small it wouldn’t even be noticeable, just noticeable to him.”

Frase read a lot growing up, but he wasn’t a bookish kid, or looking for a career in the book business. He did maintenance work for an apartment management company but was laid off in 1982 during the Reagan recession, when work wasn’t easy to come by. The owner of The King of Rome Bookstore in the Sellwood neighborhood hired him to fill in when he went on vacations. Goetz knew the guy Frase worked for in Sellwood, and Frase managed to parlay that into a recommendation that led to the job at Cameron’s. “By the end of the year,” he said, “Fred needed a manager, and we were getting along, so I just said, ‘Okay, fine.’”

When Mr. Goetz decided to retire in 1989 and sell the store, he gave Frase first crack at coming up with the money. Frase borrowed the down payment from his father and paid it off over ten years. Mr. Goetz continued to work for the store in his retirement, helping with back stock.

***

With more print magazines adding web content than they used to, and some like Newsweek and Spin abandoning print altogether, Frase has noticed a dip in modern used magazine sales. He would usually sell recent magazine issues within a month or two, but no longer. “Certain titles—there’s just no interest in it. That would be for things like Good Housekeeping, Ladies’ Home Journal, old-time, mainstream titles,” he said. “Once a lot of titles are off the [news]stands, I don’t need to keep buying ’em. I usually have sufficient quantities.”

Some magazines are more resilient than others. “Vogue seems to be about as big as it ever was. Fashion magazines,” he said, “there’s still demand for those.” Rolling Stone vintage copies are still one of his top-sellers out front. And, even though it’s a magazine that many people discuss based on how far behind they are on their reading, used New Yorkers still sell well. “You never know what will sell and what won’t, but rock musicians tend to do pretty well. Of course, I can always sell Marilyn Monroe stuff out there, certain baseball covers, sports heroes, and movie stars.”

To make the collectible magazine trade profitable, Frase employs specific strategies. The most important is depth. He has to stock many weeks and years for a particular title; a couple hundred issues isn’t enough. It has to be decades’ worth. Frase keeps track of his Life magazine stock with a cover guide that he tore out of one of the magazine in the ’80s and laminated. When he sells an issue, he puts a mark through the cover with a grease pencil. That way he knows which issue to replace. “It’s crude but effective.” Life magazine published weekly, which means lots of issues to monitor. The only other titles where he tracks the issues are Playboy and National Geographic.

Recently, Frase has noticed women in their early twenties to thirties buying vintage Playboy as gifts for their boyfriends. He said that never used to happen, but added, “If you get ’em back to the ’70s, there’s a certain quaintness to them.”

Another magazine that has proven popular is Fortune from the 1930s and 1940s, which was a big magazine, square-bound, almost more of a large softcover book. “It was a gorgeous magazine back then. It cost a dollar when everything else cost a dime. There’s a lot of nice color lithographs and offset in it. All it took was one or two people interested, and they pretty much wiped me out. I’ve never ever been able to replace them.” Issues from the 1930s sometimes featured unusual tip-ins (materials inserted in between pages), such as fishermen flies and cigar bands. One issue had a double foldout of a German zeppelin that Frase sold for $75.

One of the most sought-after vintage magazines he stocks is a 1962 issue of Life. In it, the subscription card runs through the center binding, and comes out the other end as a double-sided baseball card. One side is Roger Maris, the other Mickey Mantle. It easily sells for a hundred dollars. And, in one of the biggest recent windfalls for Cameron’s, a forty-year-old man visited from British Columbia. He was looking primarily for 1920s and 1930s Saturday Evening Post and Collier’s, with the intent to scan the covers for an online archive. He spent about three thousand dollars in one visit.

Although he doesn’t market aggressively or have more than a modest web presence, Frase isn’t a Luddite. He has a laptop and cell phone. He uses e-mail. If he finds an op-ed in The Oregonian by a writer he likes and the piece is only available online, he’ll read it. He’s just not interested in using a Nook or Kindle. Someone came into the store once and tried to sell him a device.

“It was probably hot,” Frase said. He laughed at the thought of it. “Tried to sell me one, like, ‘What good would that do me?’ He didn’t really have an answer, just thought I would want one because I was a bookstore, but I told him to get out, in so many words. No, wait. I didn’t tell him to get out. I said, ‘Get that thing outta here.’” An unfiltered giddiness infused his laugher. “I mean, people come in and use them, and I don’t make snarky comments or anything like that. I’m sort of live and let live. But, you know, you hear a lot of stuff like, ‘I got a Kindle, but I still prefer the real thing.’ I just say, ‘Well, that’s good.’ I imagine I could come up with a few pretty snarky comments, but I hold my tongue. It doesn’t do ya’ any good to alienate anybody. If you can help it.”

Recently, I sold Jeff Frase some new issues of The New Yorker, The Economist and Travel + Leisure. He gave me three dollars in store credit. He used the edge of the counter to tear off a square of paper and scribbled “$3.00 credit” on it. I used it for a 1973 copy of Esquire, the 40th Anniversary Issue. I didn’t know I wanted it until I found it on the back shelf. The painting on its gatefold cover functions as a literary who’s-who of the era, albeit the typical literary boy’s club: Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, Nora Ephron, John Cheever, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Dorothy Parker, Philip Roth, Gay Talese, both Tom and Thomas Wolfe, John Updike, Saul Bellow, James Baldwin, Vladimir Nabokov, John Steinbeck, and Sinclair Lewis. The yellowing sticker on its cover was addressed to a subscriber named G H Sisson in Burlingame, California. The cover price: $2. I paid $7.50. Another bargain.

I’d also tried to sell Frase recent back issues of literary journals, but he said that, with the exception of Granta and Tin House, they don’t sell. Looking at the early issues of Glimmer Train and copies of defunct titles like Story, I could see he was right. “They just sit,” he said, “mostly forever.” With shelf space at such a premium, Frase has to allocate space to items with a better turnover. Ezra Pound said that literature is the news that stays news, yet despite the durability of literary magazines’ poems and stories, Rolling Stone and Post do better here.

While I browsed a shelf of used literary journals, Jeff answered a call from a man he seemed to know. They talked about magazines. The man was searching for one of a particular vintage, but Jeff didn’t have it in stock. “Yeah,” Jeff said, his voice pained. “Well, it comes through sometimes, but not much. No, not very much. Things like Argosy and that, yeah.” Through a gap in the makeshift shelves I saw him adjust his position behind the counter and uncross his arms. “I got a box of ’em that I drag out for people that are interested,” he told the man on the phone. “Nineteen fifties are five dollars, forties are seven fifty, thirties are ten.”

I sat on the floor and flipped through old issues of Ploughshares and Story, but didn’t buy any.

After a pause, Jeff groaned and tilted his head. “Yeah, there might be one back there, but I can’t check. Normally I would, but today I got something to do so I have to split right at six. We close at six, but normally I would.” The caller then asked about Jeff’s daughter, and the timber of his voice brightened. “She’s great,” he said. “A freshman. Older, like us.” He paused, listening to something the caller was telling him, then he said, “You know, I was just thinking about that the other night. It does fly by. It sure does.”

Photo by Aaron Gilbreath

Explore a few of the last remaining vintage magazine shops:

Magazine Museum
4906 W. Oakton
Skokie, IL

Periodicals Paradise
1924 NE 40th Ave
Portland, OR

Shake Rattle & Read
4812 N Broadway St.
Chicago, IL

——

About the author: Aaron Gilbreath (@AaronGilbreath) has written essays for The New York Times, Kenyon Review, Paris Review, Tin House, AGNI, Black Warrior Review, Brick, The Threepenny Review, Gettysburg Review and Hotel Amerika, and articles for Oxford American, Yeti and The Awl. He sells tea in Portland, Oregon. Visit him online.

Cover detail from Demons by Dostoyevsky

The following post is part of our online companion to our Spring 2013 issue on The Business of Literature. Click here for an overview of the issue.

——

“There are moments, and it is only a matter of five or six seconds, when you feel the presence of the eternal harmony … a terrible thing is the frightful clearness with which it manifests itself and the rapture with which it fills you. If this state were to last more than five seconds, the soul could not endure it and would have to disappear. During these five seconds I live a whole human existence, and for that I would give my whole life and not think that I was paying too dearly.”

—Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Demons

This passage from Dostoyevsky is taped to the wall above my desk. I’ve always been fascinated by the unstable line between inspiration and madness, and how authors over the centuries have tried to explain the art of writing—its holy and demonic pull, but to my mind, none expresses the mixture of rapture and terrible clarity, the loss of time, control, and the unendurable obliteration of self as intently and precisely as Dostoyevsky does here.

Writing is sacred to me. It is, at times perhaps, a rapture, but not an easy one. I sometimes will question a writer who says, “I love what I do,” because “love” is not exactly the word I would use. Writing is what I know how to do, but it’s also a necessity. To me, there is not much more than the thrill of a well-told story. That’s how I make sense of my world.

It was a day thirty years ago—during tenth-grade English—when my passion for stories became hitched to a more particular ambition. It was winter, through the windows we could see snow falling outside, and our teacher, Mr. Rossiter, was talking about a poem by T.S. Eliot. I don’t remember which poem it was. I don’t remember exactly what he said about it. But I will never forget the look on his face, how his eyes lit up as he spoke about that poem with such fire that I understood that reading that poem had changed him.

I remember thinking to myself: I want to write something that makes someone feel that.

***

I thought it was a simple thing to want. At fifteen, I didn’t understand that to dedicate my life to working to evoke that kind of visceral response in a reader came at a certain price. And by price, I don’t mean the challenges you might expect: the long years of rejection, near-misses, or the sudden (if you are “lucky”), mind-bending success—an agent, a book deal, exposure, all that. By price, I don’t mean the number of pages written and trashed, or the hours of ordinary life with family or friends that you give up to hang out with people who do not exist. I don’t mean the unexpected grief that can sometimes come with letting a book go out into the world, or the consequent challenge of learning to discern the difference between the demands placed on “you the author” and the needs of  “you the writer.”

And by price, I don’t even mean the challenges of learning to navigate the high-paced roller-coaster ride that modern publishing can be, and how authors now are expected to spend a lot of time engaged in self-promotion and on social media, which can be important, even necessary, but which can also be diametrically opposed to the slow, deep, quiet time that good creative work requires. It is a challenge to find your balance with this and to continue to make room for solitude even after you have published—to make space to let the writing mind dream.

The cost I am talking about has more to do with rejecting the myth of control and letting the fire and voice of a story rise up and become the driving force of a piece, to let it assume the full range of intensity and life it was intended for. In a 2012 interview with the Guardian, novelist Siri Hustvedt was asked about the greatest myth of writing a book and she spoke of just this: “There’s a myth of control. Writers are in control of editing processes—making a sentence better, cutting a paragraph. But the initial outpouring has very little to do with conscious control or manipulation.” It’s a thought that aligns with French writer André Gide’s claim that “Only those things are beautiful which are inspired by madness and written by reason.”

What is the cost to be inspired by madness? To be willing and ready to lose yourself to that rapture and terrible clarity that Dostoyevsky describes?

My own novels start as tiny glimmers—of character, story, scene. I don’t have an arc or structure mapped out. I have tiny hot pieces kicking around in me, and I feel them, not with the mind, but with the body. They have a certain feverish intensity, a certain dreamlike immediacy. They feel alive. And the challenge for me in that early stage of a novel is to stay open to that life, to lean into that feeling of raw, at times untenable emotion that can’t quite be circumnavigated by the daylight mind. It’s a human impulse, in writing and in life, to avert the eyes—to look or move away from what feels too intense or excessive, to pin it down into logical terms.

But the work of a writer is often to open to that intensity, that burn and chaos of feeling; to allow yourself to be driven by possibilities you have not yet uncovered, a revelation you do not yet know, or to let a character you have fallen for turn into someone else on the page. Because it can be those moments—in fact it is those unexpected moments—when something you think you are so sure of twists and becomes something else that infuses real life into a story.

That state of openness for me is not a moment. It’s not entirely temporal, but it is a state I cultivate and protect. When a story really burns in me that way, it doesn’t matter if I am at my desk, running with the dog, or driving to school to pick up my boys. It does not matter if I am out for dinner or in a conversation. It’s like a second skin layered over everything else. It might be silenced for a moment, or be turned to a lower volume. I might get wrenched out of a passage or a line I am in the midst of crafting, and that line might be lost, but I have a certain faith that if a phrase or even a paragraph gets scattered like that, it will return if it’s meant to. The line might be gone, but the state isn’t. And to me, what matters is that commitment to staying open to a story. There’s a violence to it, like a drug or a love affair. When a story has me that way, it is always falling through me, pushing up in me. That is the state I am in, and I can answer the phone or the doorbell, or not; I can respond to an email, or not; I can drive to school to pick up my boys, fix dinner, go to baseball, come home, take the dog for a walk, and at the end of those instances of ordinary life, that story will still be there waiting for me to write into it and write it down. When I am in that place of free-fall through a story, which can last for several weeks, the most significant change, I notice, is that I don’t really sleep. It keeps me up late after the rest of the house is in bed; it snaps me awake at 3 a.m.

It is not always pleasant, that burn for a story and the work of staying open. It can be a rush, a fall-off-the-cliff kind of feeling, but more often, it brings me to the edge of a very human kind of heartbreak, an intense despair I do not want to linger with too long. Sometimes it’s like grit in the eye or a splinter—the way an element of a story or a character’s flaw needles at you. Sometimes it’s a dark kind of pressure inside, that you can’t get clear of until you sit with it, lean into it, let it change you, and in that process, work it through to the page.

And then it is there, in lined notebooks or a docx file, a draft of 100 or 300 pages. At that point, the controlled work of the reasonable mind cuts in, to make order of that madness, to work that lake of raw emotion into a more singular form. “Kill your darlings.” Cut the chaff. Revisit. Re-envision. Rework. Hone the “initial outpouring” into the shape of a story with plot, pace, structure, and a sharp sense of narrative drive.

I love the transformative work of revision. I love being able to live for months on that cool, saner edge of the mind. For me, revision is deeply creative work. It’s methodical, ruthless work, and I love that. But it’s not what drives me. It’s not the aspect of the art I lose my mind to. It’s not what I crave to get back to once I have finished a book and sent it off. What I want back then is the untenable nature of being, that intensity of feeling so much, too much.

***

A good friend of mine recently published her first novel. She is a brilliant writer, and as the reviews began to roll in, I watched her spirits soar. There were raves in Booklist and the Boston Globe, then a profoundly scathing review elsewhere. She called me in tears. “I don’t know what to do with this feeling,” she said. “I wasn’t ready—this crazy awful feeling, this doubt.”

I gave her some advice my editor gave me once, years ago, when my first novel hit the world, and I couldn’t quite get my bearings: “Just write.”

I told my friend, the young writer, this:

It may not seem so now, but this is a gift: to get the praise and the mixed reviews, to learn how to field and deflect them both and buckle yourself into the fact that this is just how it is going to be from now on. None of that opinion—the good and the bad flying around out there—really has much to do with what you, as a writer, are called to do.

Reviews will come. There will be a whole landscape of them, and at the end of the day, all that really matters is that there was a story you loved once, that burned in you enough that you took a few years of your life and wrote it down. What matters is that there is a new story prickling around in you now, snapping you awake at 3 a.m.  It is a kind of possession, that madness, that outpouring, that loss of control, but a willing and logical one inexorably driven by a need to create a work with life and meaning, that will in some future time move readers or change how they think in some slight, vital way or cause them to see—perhaps differently—the simple beauty of an ordinary moment underscored by an acute awareness of its transience. In other words, the cost is not simply the madness, the loss of your reasonable self for the sake of a paragraph or passage or the fate of a character who has nabbed your heart. The cost is not simply the possession, but the fierce, leveling need to be possessed.

Whether someone loves what you’ve done or not, someone else’s reaction to a book you’ve written has very little to do with what drove you to write it in the first place. It has very little to do with what will continue to drive you to wake up tomorrow, and the day after, to go to your desk, and pour yourself into the page.

“Just write.”

Cut yourself open to the world, see and feel as much as you can bear and take that feeling and lean into it, kick it open, transform it. Live in that madness and get it onto the page. Learn your own voice, trust your own instincts, find that next story you are on fire to tell.

Write.

———

About the author: Winner of the Massachusetts Book Award for fiction, Dawn Tripp (@dawntrippwriter) is the author of the novels Moon Tide, The Season of Open Water, and Game of Secrets, a Boston Globe bestseller. Her essays have appeared in The Rumpus, Psychology Today, and on NPR. She can be reached through her website, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

“The law in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.”  —Anatole France

“Those who have put out the people’s eyes, reproach them of their blindness.” —John Milton

The majority of celebratory days in America are devoid of substance, mandating consumption and commercial extravaganzas. For instance, not only have the traditional observances of Abraham Lincoln’s and George Washington’s birthdays been conjoined to one Monday in February, but they are now celebrated as President’s Day—a day in which automobile dealers flourish and department stores and other merchants pound us with that relentless “Buy, buy, buy” leitmotif.

Not to belabor this point, but another dismal development is the virtual indifference to the reasons for the existence of Labor Day. In addition to signaling the official end-of-the-wearing-of-linen season, that day is another signal to loose the dogs of commercialism and the commencement of the fall sales season. Forget about any homage to the Labor Movement and the economic justice that it fought to provide American working people. (In Boston, thousands of students are participating in the major moving-day ritual, which—if they thought about it—has a connection to Labor with a capitol L). And, in fact, in recent years there have been appalling attempts to vilify and devalue the important contributions by labor unions.

And so there is May Day. Originally a Celtic pagan celebration, it is now officially observed as a national holiday in over 80 nations as International Workers’ Day. In the United States, a broad spectrum of the Left (socialist, communist, and anarchist groups) commemorates a seminal event in Labor history, the 1886 Chicago Haymarket Riot or Massacre. What follows is an array of books that represent or inform oppositional thinking and activism. And as I am not inclined to the doctrinaire or the theoretical, you may find these tomes cover a wide disparate topography and are thus listed in no particular order.

Historian Irving Bernstein’s seminal two-volume history of the American labor movement, The Lean Years: A History of the American Worker, 1920-1933 and The Turbulent Years A History of the American Worker, 1933–1941 (Haymarket Books) “recaptures the social history of the decade leading up to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s inauguration, uncovers its widespread inequality, and sheds light on the long-forgotten struggles that form the prelude to the great labor victories of the 1930s.”

As Frances Fox Piven observes in her introduction to Volume II, “There are many lessons to be learned from The Turbulent Years, but perhaps the most potent is that the popular moods and understandings that fuel protest movements can change, and change rapidly. We should hope for this in our own time, and we should do more than hope. We should work to make it true.”

Labor unrest and activism is frequently laid at the feet of Karl Marx, the international boogeyman of all right-thinking peoples. Thus, Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life by historian Jonathan Sperber (Liveright), hailed as “a defining work,” takes a more modern approach to biography by placing Marx in the context of his revolutionary era. Biographer Ian Kershaw extolls Sperber’s approach: “By locating Marx squarely in the society and intellectual currents of the nineteenth century, rather than interpreting him in the light of twentieth-century history, … [this] excellent biography succeeds splendidly in reshaping our image of the man and his thought.”

Edited by his close friend Ken Smith, Waltzing at the Doomsday Ball: The Best of Joe Bageant (Scribe Publications) is a compilation of, as the title indicates, some of the most pungent and well-targeted critiques of the regnant social order that you have never read. Since I am fairly certain you have never heard of Joe Bageant (Rainbow Pie: A Redneck Memoir & Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America’s Class War), who died in 2011, here is a bit from his mini-autobiography:

Born 1946 in Winchester VA, USA. US Navy, Vietnam era veteran. After stint in Navy became anti-war hippie, ran off to the West Coast … lived in communes, hippie school buses. … Moved to the Coeur d’Alene Indian reservation in Idaho, built a cabin, lived without electricity, farmed with horses for seven years … Moved to Moscow, Idaho, worked on third rate newspaper there …

Credited as a patriarch of the Occupy movement, anthropologist David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years (Melville House), as one would expect for an anarchist text (apparently his politics also make him non grata at American universities), received minimal mainstream media attention in the US, which did not prevent it from becoming a best seller. Graeber observes at a Washington Post blog:

It is simply assumed, nowadays, that we will be born to indebted, mortgage-paying parents, go deep into debt for our educations, and never, quite, completely, get out—and, therefore, that we will both live our lives with a constant feeling of at least slight attendant fear and humiliation, and that a significant portion of our life income will end up being paid out in interest and financial service payments. …

We already learned in 2008 that debts—even trillions in debts—can be made to go away if the debtor is sufficiently rich and influential. It is only a matter of time before people draw the obvious conclusions: that if money is just a social arrangement, so many IOUs that can be renegotiated by mutual agreement, then if democracy is to mean anything, that has to be true for everyone, not just the few.

And the implications of that could be epochal.

Also, David Graeber’s The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, and a Movement (Speigel & Grau), a brief account of the Occupy movement, has been recently published.

Revisionist historian and progressive activist Howard Zinn’s work, A People’s History of The United States, not only fostered a reexamination of America’s history from the bottom up but spawned a cottage industry of people’s histories. Since Zinn’s death in 2010, there have been numerous posthumous books published. The Indispensable Zinn: The Essential Writings of the “People’s Historian”, edited by Timothy Patrick McCarthy (The New Press) contains excerpts from A People’s; his memoir, You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train; his writings on the civil rights movement; and the full text of his play Marx in Soho. That’s a useful introduction to Zinn with an introduction by fellow activist Noah Chomsky.

Given the rapidity of the transformational plateaus attached to technological innovation, our attention to the struggle for freedom vs. corporate domination is frequently distracted by the effort to adapt our lives to all manner of digitalized confusion.

Eugene Morozov’s two books, The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom and the most recent To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism (Public Affairs), focus on what he views and vociferously attacks as “solutionism”—in technology the idea that deep and serious problems can be solved with a few apps. You can get a taste of Morozov’s take-no-prisoners in the most recent Baffler (#22), one of the few useful oppositional journals being published, along with Truth Dig, TomDispatch and The Onion. Appended to his 16,000-word The Meme Hustler, a dissection of the thoughts of Tim O’Reilly, founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media—to whom he attaches this indictment, “The enduring emptiness of our technology debates has one main cause, and his name is Tim O’Reilly—is an elucidating author’s note:

In researching this essay, I tried to read all of O’Reilly’s published writings … But I decided against interviewing him. First of all, I don’t believe in interviewing spin-doctors: the interviewer learns nothing new while the interviewee gets an extraordinary opportunity to spin the story even before it’s published. Second, my goal in writing this essay was not to profile O’Reilly. Of course, I could have told you all about the wonderful jams—plum, blackberry, raspberry, peach—that he likes to make in his spare time. I left out such trivia on purpose, as my main interest has been O’Reilly the thinker, not O’Reilly the human being. Serious thinkers can be judged by their published output alone.

And if you have an appetite for more Evgeny Morozov, his take on another of his adversaries, futurist Jaron Lanier’s new tome, is here.

Conventional wisdom’s characterization of  “the masses” as apathetic lumpen volk is reified by the cynical view that people are inherently selfish and are inclined to “a lifeboat mentality” (see the 1944 film Lifeboat). In A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster (Viking), author /activist Rebecca Solnit has quite a lot to say about this, mostly in eloquent repudiation of that view. From the book’s description:

The most startling thing about disasters is not merely that so many people rise to the occasion, but that they do so with joy. That joy reveals an ordinarily unmet yearning for community, purposefulness, and meaningful work that disaster often provides. A Paradise Built in Hell is an investigation of the moments of altruism, resourcefulness, and generosity that arise amid disaster’s grief and disruption and considers their implications for everyday life. It points to a new vision of what society could become-one that is less authoritarian and fearful, more collaborative and local.

Solnit selects a half-dozen historic natural disasters from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake to the Hurricane Katrina to illustrate her remarkable view. Read the first chapter here.

The so-called Marathon bombings unleashed another wave of panic, soul-searching, and inscrutable acts of solidarity—the singing of “Sweet Caroline” throughout major league baseballdom, professional athletes wearing various iterations of “Boston Strong,” and now the obligatory music concert engaging various historic septuagenarian bands in a fundraiser. Just as various voices of the Left were at the very least admonished for their “chickens coming home to roost” arguments (Susan Sontag, Howard Zinn), attached to the events of 9/11, it remains to be seen if that view will remain anathema—consider Noam Chomsky’s post Marathon observations:

It’s rare for privileged Westerners to see, graphically, what many others experience daily—for example, in a remote village in Yemen, the same week as the marathon bombings. On April 23, Yemeni activist and journalist Farea Al-Muslimi, who had studied at an American high school, testified before a U.S. Senate committee that right after the marathon bombings, a drone strike in his home village in Yemen killed its target. The strike terrorized the villagers, turning them into enemies of the United States—something that years of jihadi propaganda had failed to accomplish.

Chomsky’s view will be much more creditable, if not acceptable, if and when Americans pays attention to the astounding revelations in journalist Jeremy Scahill‘s new book Dirty Wars, described by the publisher as taking us inside America’s new covert wars:

Dirty Wars follows the consequences of the declaration that “the world is a battlefield.” From Afghanistan to Yemen, Somalia and beyond, Scahill reports from the frontlines in this high-stakes investigation and explores the depths of America’s global killing machine. He goes beneath the surface of these covert wars, conducted in the shadows, outside the range of the press, without effective congressional oversight or public debate.

Providing additional verification of the ugly truths revealed by Scahill’s reportage is the film Dirty Wars.

Three recent anthologies provide a wide array of left-oriented thinkers and activists.

• Protest Nation: Words That Inspired A Century of American Radicalism, edited by Timothy Patrick McCarthy (The New Press) selects from 20th-century speeches, letters, broadsides, essays, and manifestos penned by Eugene V. Debs and Rachel Carson to Harvey Milk and Peter Singer.

• Sasha Lilley compiles Capital and Its Discontents: Conversations with Radical Thinkers in a Time of Tumult (PM Press) that includes Noam Chomsky, Tariq Ali, David Harvey, Ellen Meiksins Wood, Mike Davis, and Doug Henwood.

• UC/Berkeley mentor Harry Kreisler’s Political Awakenings: Conversations with History broadens the scope with hour-long conversations activists such as pre-senatorial Elizabeth Warren, Nobel Peace Prize-winning lawyer Shirin Ebadi, Michael Pollan, Justice Albie Sachs Tariq Ali, Howard Zinn, and Oliver Stone (The New Press).

All ballyhoo to the contrary, the notion that the Internet is democratic, spawns democracy, and protects individuals is a thesis that Robert McChesney (Rich Media, Poor Democracy) passionately contests. In Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism is Turning the Internet Against Democracy. Robert McChesney asserts:

“… the sharp decline in the enforcement of antitrust violations, the increase in patents on digital technology and proprietary systems, and massive indirect subsidies and other policies have made the internet a place of numbing commercialism.”

And even more disastrous, the domination of the Internet by corporations has “collapsed credible journalism”:

Journalism is the main way modern societies produce and disseminate political information, and it is of singular importance in democracies. Much has been made of how the Internet has destroyed the commercial news media business model. With no sense of irony, the same people argue that the Internet will combine with free markets to magically re-create a new, different, and superior news media system sometime in the future. I assess and reject those claims.

You can read the first chapter of Digital Disconnect here. Or hear Robert McChesney on Democracy Now.

Last, but not least, George Scialabba’s new collection of essays For the Republic (Pressed Wafer) and  Eduardo Galeano’s Children of the Days: A Calendar of Human History (Nation Books) provide  more subtle and nuanced points of view of the age-old battle of Freedom vs Organization (aka as domination). Galeano needs no introduction and if you are not familiar with Scialabba—well, you should be.

Needless to say, this grouping of contentious books is neither exhaustive nor exclusive—some have gained notice, and some are known to that growing number of alienated and disenchanted Americans. In any case it is a cause for small wonder that there are still publishers who find that civilization benefits from contrarian (dialectical) views. I am told that on the Freud Memorial in Vienna you can find the epigram, “The voice of Reason is small but persistent.”

Amen for that.

RIP Aaron Swartz.

——

About the author: Robert Birnbaum’s Social Security number ends in 2247. He lives in zip code 02465 and area code 617. He was born in the 2nd month of a year in the 20th century. He doesn’t social network (used as a verb) except through his Cuban retriever Beny (named after Beny More, the Frank Sinatra of Cuba). Izzy Birnbaum also has cloud storage and uses electronic mail. He hopes his son Cuba is the second coming of Pudge Rodriguez. He mutters to himself at Our Man In Boston.

rrraven / 123RF Stock Photo

The following post is part of our online companion to our Spring 2013 issue on The Business of Literature. Click here for an overview of the issue.

——

On a recent evening I rode up the elevator to a party in New York with the writer Kati Marton, who had just published a memoir about the untimely death of her husband, diplomat and UN ambassador Richard Holbrooke. She looked shaken, and though I know her only slightly, I felt compelled to ask if she was all right. She’d just come from giving a reading, she told me, where the audience was full of other grief-stricken people who had come to hear her, not because of the literary quality of her work, the stellar reviews, her vaunted reputation, but rather because she had become a “figure”—someone who was “sharing” about her loss, and with whom they, too, wanted to share.

In the last five years or so, writers have started to juggle three realities, and it isn’t graceful, or easy—in fact, it’s complicated, and many of us are awkward about it. We have our “real” selves, of course—the ones who put dinner on the table and drive the kids to school and go out for a few beers with friends; then we have our creative selves, which require the solitude, the space to access the private, internal place which we write from; and then we have this whole other self, one that threatens to encroach on the other two: our “avatar” selves—the pixelated, haiku version that tweets and maintains a Facebook page and goes on the road in carefully planned outfits (these could be ripped jeans and a T-shirt, but believe me they’ve been thought through) and this—this avatar version—becomes how we’re seen, how we’re responded to, and if we are not careful, we are at risk of it becoming who we are.

After my last book—a memoir called Devotion—came out, I spent eighteen months on the road. Not a week went by in which I wasn’t in front of an audience, somewhere. I learned the intricacies of packing a carry-on, got to know the TSA people at my local airport by first name. At the same time, I was maintaining my Facebook page, which was growing by the day, and I was learning to tweet. Oh, and blog. Each week, I wrote a blog post. I received dozens of e-mails a day from readers who had connected with my story of a complex and rocky path that led me away from the strict religious observance of my childhood to a place, in midlife, of needing to figure out what I believed and how I might create an inclusive, eclectic and meaningful daily existence for myself and my family. These readers thanked me for sharing, and then told me their own stories—often in great detail—painful, wrenching stories that by their very natures demanded a response.

I spent my time—for that year and a half—in full-on public engagement. I developed a certain comfort level and skill for public speaking. When I began my book tour, I was asked by an organization interested in booking me as a speaker to describe my “message.” I was confounded. I was a novelist and memoirist, I said. I didn’t have a message. Wrong answer. I quickly learned that if I wanted the opportunity to speak in front of audiences larger than the dozen or so who frequent bookstore readings, I would have to reverse-engineer my book in order to unearth some sound bites. As I traveled the country disguised as something of a motivational speaker, I was away from my husband, my young son, my home, my dogs, my desk. At a certain point, I began to see that I was away from my self—the very self that had written the book.

It’s a noisy, noisy world. Writers have navigated public appearances and book tours for years, but our presence on social media and its concomitant daily engagement with ourselves as “figures” is something relatively new—and we’re only at the beginning. Without a doubt, all that I’ve done in the last several years—the speaking gigs, the social media presence (I have more than 6,000 friends and “likes” on Facebook and nearly that many Twitter followers, and regularly get notes from other writers and even editors asking how to build their “platforms,” which is a word I despise and an idea I had never even considered)—all that work has helped me enormously in the “business” of writing. The impression is that I have a very successful career. And while I do have a successful career, the success of my avatar has outpaced me. My avatar has an endless stream of fun and engaging experiences, and never has a bad day. My avatar is awesome. I almost kind of envy her.

I live on the top of a hill in the middle of nowhere. Now that my book tour is over, I write in a silent house when my family is gone for the day. I don’t answer the phone, and use a software program called “Freedom” that shuts down the Internet on my computer during the hours I write. I find myself getting more and more militant about protecting my time—the time devoted to my creative self—in the hope that the work that self does, during those hours, will be able to speak for itself.

But my guess is that when my next book comes out (a book, ironically enough, that I sold based on the success of my blog) I will once again be packing my carry-on, once again getting to know the new crop of TSA agents at the airport. I will up my tweeting and Facebook presence, and I will be accessible to my readers. Because I want to be read. I want that private, intimate, high-wire act that takes place in the quiet of my empty house to find its voice in the world—and these days, the only way that’s going to happen is if I help it along—all the while finding a way to stay very clear and honest and self-aware, so that I don’t ever mistake myself for my avatar. I check in with her on a daily basis, I tweet cleverly for her, and post photographs on Facebook of her speaking to audiences, or walking down streets in far-flung cities. I announce her appearances, and even sometimes where she’s having dinner. But I remember that she’s not me. Not exactly. Because the minute I forget, the writing will turn to dust.

——

About the author: Dani Shapiro’s new book, Still Writing: The Pleasures and Perils of a Creative Life, will be out from Grove Atlantic in October. Other books include the best-selling memoirs Devotion and Slow Motion, and the novels Black & White and Family History. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, Granta, Tin House, Ploughshares, One Story, Zyzzyva, the New York Times Book Review, and has been read on NPR’s “This American Life.” She currently teaches at The Center for Fiction, The Provincetown Fine Arts Works Center, and the Kripalu Center for Yoga & Health. She is the co-founder of the Sirenland Writers’ Conference in Positano, Italy. You can find her on Twitter and Facebook.

Until August 1, 2013, VQR is open for submissions. For your convenience, our guidelines are below, but you can always reference them on our website, plus double-check to see whether we’re open or closed.

Editorial Philosophy

VQR strives to publish the best writing we can find. While we have a long history of publishing accomplished and award-winning authors, we also seek and support emerging writers. A look at one of our latest issues will show you the diversity of voices we publish.

Genres

•  Poetry: All types and length.
•  Short Fiction: Length is from 2,000–10,000 words. We are generally not interested in genre fiction (such as romance, science fiction, or fantasy).
•  Nonfiction: Length is 3,500–10,000 words. We publish literary, art, and cultural criticism; reportage; historical and political analysis; and travel essays. We publish few author interviews or memoirs. In general, we are looking for nonfiction that looks out on the world, rather than within the self.
•  Nonfiction pitches: We also accept pitches through our submission portal. Submit the pitch in a document, as you would for a finished piece, and include an estimate of any expenses involved to produce your story.

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For poetry, we pay $200 per poem; for poems longer than 50 lines, the payment is higher. For prose, we generally pay approximately 25 cents per word, depending on length. For investigative reporting, we pay at a higher rate, sometimes including pre-approved travel expenses.

Our standard publishing agreement asks for the following rights in exchange: first North American print and digital magazine rights; nonexclusive online rights; and other limited rights. Copyright is retained by the author at all times. Authors are free to resell the work, though we do ask for a 90-day exclusive from our first publication of the work.

Please do not e-mail us to ask if we received your submission. If the submissions system acknowledged your submission, or if you received an e-mail confirming receipt of your submission, then rest assured that we have received it and we will review it.

Click here to go to our online submission form at Submittable.

The following post is part of our online companion to our Spring 2013 issue on The Business of Literature. Click here for an overview of the issue.

——

Five years ago, when I first started working from home as a freelance writer, my husband and I had come to an understanding. “If you can’t make this work within a year,” said Michael, “you’ll have to get another job.”

“Agreed.”

Within six months, I’d matched my previous salary.

Elated, and feeling confident, I rewarded myself with a desk chair. One of those ergonomic types, with the webbed back that gives just a little. Until then, I’d been pulling over a hard-backed chair from the kitchen.

After that, I continued to coast along, getting a lot of referral work and even landing a couple regular gigs.

When the economy went to shit another six months after that, I floundered for a bit. A newspaper I’d been copyediting for folded. A blogging client cut back on budget. Still, I rolled with the punches. I diversified. I learned how to be a businesswoman. I slowly regained ground. And just a couple years later—despite the natural ups and downs of freelancing—I managed to finish paying off $10,000 worth of old credit card debt.

Things were going well for Michael, too. He finally left the copywriting job he’d been hating for seven and a half long years, after landing a web development job at a startup in Manhattan. It came with a nice boost in salary and, eventually, he was making over twice what he used to make. Even better: He loved what he did.

Still, things aren’t always easy, even when things are going well.

Every month, I roll my chair close to the desk, and scrutinize my bank account. Will I be able to make it until the next paycheck arrives? Or should I just ask Michael for money? Because he pays the bulk of the bills, I try to avoid asking. I don’t want to see that look on his face—that one that insinuates that I’ll never make it without him.

Then there’s the issue of housework.

“Could you please clean the dishes in the sink?” I asked one day, as I was simultaneously sautéing veggies in one pan, stirring up a concoction in the stockpot, and chopping up onions. Chicken stock had splashed onto my top, there was a sprinkling of salt and pepper all over my pants, and I was wearing onion goggles to keep from crying.

“I just walked in,” said Michael. “I’d like to relax on the couch for a little bit.”

“And I’d like to snuggle with the cats and a good book,” I said, “but I just stopped working 15 minutes ago, I’ve been juggling multiple pots and pans so I could have dinner ready for the both of us, and it would be nice if you could contribute.”

“You think I’m not contributing?” he said, as if I was referring to the state of our marriage rather than the state of our dinner. “I’m paying all the bills! You have no right to say that when I’m working hard to keep a roof over our heads.”

And though we already sounded like a sitcom cliché: “Like the work I do doesn’t matter?” I responded. “Like I’m not allowed to ask for anything because your salary is so astronomically higher than mine? I’m so glad you feel fine throwing my income in my face every time we have a goddamn argument.”

And we were off. He stomped his feet and clenched his fists and flared his nostrils.

I flared my nostrils even more. I am fucking fantastic when it comes to flaring my nostrils. I threw a dish towel to the floor and flung my onion goggles across the kitchen counters, where they bounced against the backsplash.

Our voices kept rising as we tried to out-shout each other. My hands trembled as I continued preparing dinner in the midst of our fight. We eventually ended up at opposite ends of the house, seething.

Sometimes I suspect he likes having that one-up on me. I mean, these arguments happen less frequently than they once did, and we’re a lot less ruthless than we once were—I think that’s called growing up—but when we do see fit to raise our voices and stomp our feet and treat each other terribly, he invariably throws down that favorite trump card of his: The fact that we’re both working hard, but he’s the one keeping us afloat. The fact that I have no right to complain about anything, because he’s the one keeping a roof over our head.

He’s carrying me.

He’s carrying us.

I wouldn’t say that this is an issue particular to writers. I feel that the power dynamic within a marriage is inevitably changed any time one person makes significantly more or less than another.

But as a writer, I can’t help but question the value of the work I’m doing in comparison to the work he’s doing—not because I don’t value words, but because I don’t know what I’m bringing to our marriage if I’m not bringing in money.

Even when I accomplish big things—when I break into a new publication or land a literary agent or have another project mosey my way thanks to word of mouth—I feel that it is not enough. Because more often than not, my biggest accomplishments aren’t my biggest paychecks.

So what good am I? Where is my worth in all of this?

Just the other month, freelance journalist Nate Thayer called out The Atlantic for asking him to do work for free. The discussion that ensued was an interesting one, especially as it pertains to the limits of digital publishing, but one of the points made in a post over at Gawker really leapt out at me: the fact that the writing game is “rigged for people who already have money.” It felt true.

Every morning, I creep out from under my bed sheets when my body says it’s ready. I slip into a ridiculous pair of cat slippers and shuffle my way downstairs, to a beautifully furnished home office and a pot of freshly brewed coffee. I revise my book proposal. I futz about on Twitter. I pitch publications that pay barely anything, because I love them. I love the work they do. And I want to be a part of that.

I have a husband. I have a net. And if I didn’t, I wouldn’t be doing this. I wouldn’t be able to. I’d still be working my way up the ladder at an academic book publisher with a small marketing budget, wearing ill-fitting dress pants from Express and uncomfortable shoes and not creating anything that was mine and mine alone.

Being married allows me to have the life I have now. Being married allows me to spend all this time on things that may never bring me very much money.

And while living this life makes me feel gratitude, I will also always feel extreme, crushing guilt.

Last year, I was on the phone with a reporter from a national magazine, talking about solopreneurship and personal branding. We were having a lovely chat when he asked me about my income.

“I make about $30,000 a year,” I told him.

“You can live on that?” he asked. He asked me what I’d do if a media company offered me a staff position at $75,000.

“I’d turn it down,” I said. “No question.”

“What about $100,000?” he asked.

“Nope,” I said. “I never want to give this up.”

About a week later, my husband lost his job.

When Michael called me on the phone to tell me, I assured him it would all be okay. But when I hung up the phone, I sobbed for a while, terrified of what would become of us. I started looking at job ads on MediaBistro and JournalismJobs and Ed2010. Was it my turn? I asked myself. Was it time for me to take care of us?

Within just a few weeks, Michael had a new, even higher-paying job.

He’s still supporting us.

I think it’s safe to say I’ll never out-earn Michael. And to be honest, I don’t want to. I don’t want my income to be the thing that defines my success. I want to create something meaningful. I want to write with openness and honesty and humility and humor. I want readers to read my words and suddenly feel comfortable creating a dialogue around topics they may previously have found uncomfortable or embarrassing. I want to connect.

But damn if I don’t feel guilty wanting that.

–—

About the author: Steph Auteri (@stephauteri) is a freelance writer who has overshared on Babble, The Frisky, Nerve, LearnVest, and a slew of other print and online publications. She also regularly collaborates with sexual health and wellness professionals, helping them build their brands through quality content marketing. If you’d like to read more about yoga and the writing life, or see gratuitous cat photos, you can stalk Steph on Twitter.

General Jackson's "Chancellorsville" Portrait, taken at a Spotsylvania County farm on April 26, 1863, seven days before his mortal wounding at the Battle of Chancellorsville

I was walking through a cornfield in search of a cemetery in the middle of Virginia. A fox trotted across the path in front of me and disappeared in the forest of stalks with barely a rustle. I was searching for Stonewall Jackson’s lost arm.

Stonewall Jackson, a general in the Confederate Army, was a fanatical Presbyterian and a hypochondriac who sucked on lemons for their taste but avoided black pepper for his health. He was fearless in the face of death and received his nickname for standing “like a stone wall” against an onslaught of Union gunfire at First Manassas. But one May night in 1863, after a victory over Hooker’s forces, Jackson took advantage of the darkness to scout ahead of his own line. When he returned, a group of North Carolina pickets mistook him for the enemy and opened fire. Four of Jackson’s men were killed and three bullets lodged in his left arm. Later that night the arm was amputated; the next day it was buried.

In Chancellorsville, 150 years later, the story of this arm is surprisingly well documented. A large quartz boulder marks the place where Jackson fell and signs along Route 3 mark the “Wounding of Jackson” and “Jackson’s Amputation.” But the cemetery in which the arm was buried is not marked. I knew that an aide had taken the arm to his own family graveyard, and I learned from one of the markers that the cemetery was called Ellwood, but I didn’t know where it was—only that it was nearby.

I drove through Chancellorsville National Military Park with my eyes open for anything that looked like it might lead to a cemetery. Late in the day, in a gray misty rain, having already given up, I pulled into a driveway to turn around and stopped short at a rusty iron gate with soldered block letters, E L L W O O D.

I hesitated. It was clearly a locked gate, but a faint trail led around it and continued through dense woods. While I didn’t want to trespass, I didn’t want to retreat either. The mystery of the arm was too great; I left the car in the driveway.

The dark woods increased my sense of unease, but also my curiosity. I didn’t know if I was heading toward the cemetery or the twin barrels of a shotgun, but I walked until the trees gave way to a clearing. An abandoned barn leaned into a surrounding cornfield. Two vultures eyed me from its sagging roof but I kept going. I wanted to find the arm.

A small sign pointed to a path through some boxwoods, then cornstalks. Although I could hear an occasional car in the distance, it felt like I had stepped back in time. Just ahead was another clearing, and under a lone tree, encircled by a knee-high iron fence, was the graveyard. Among the nubs of worn stone marking the family graves was another stone, only slightly taller, engraved with “Arm of Stonewall Jackson May 3 1863.”

The place was eerie, but I was starting to appreciate its otherness—the suspicious vultures, the reassuring drone of the crickets filling what would have been an uncanny silence, the fox, the tree, the stone. It was hard to imagine this as a battle site with 100,000 men fighting, many dying. It was hard to imagine the aide with his box and his shovel, standing on this same spot, about to do his last duty to the arm of his commander. It was hard to imagine the arm, now a bone, nestled in its box under the earth. And how it had once been attached to a man who had taught philosophy at the Virginia Military Institute, married a minister’s daughter, fathered a baby girl and, after leading his division of the Army of Northern Virginia through some of the War’s most decisive battles, finally died of pneumonia in a small weathered cottage a week after the amputation.

The graveyard was silent and still, aside from the crickets and the breeze through the grass. The mist blurred the boundaries of the woods and the fields, and I felt the distance in time closing—the distance between the burial of this arm and my looking at its gravestone—and I knew I wouldn’t need anything else to remember this moment.

——

About the author: Randon Billings Noble (@RandonNoble) is an essayist. Her work has appeared in the Modern Love column of The New York Times; The Massachusetts Review; Passages North; Superstition Review; The Millions; Brain, Child online and elsewhere. You can read more of her work at her website.

We are proud to announce that W. Ralph Eubanks has been selected as editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review. He will join our staff on June 3.

Ralph will shape the content for the print and digital magazine, website, and future e-books and will provide creative direction to our organization. He is currently Director of Publishing at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC.

Ralph is a gifted editor, acclaimed author, and respected publishing industry leader. He is passionate about the craft of writing, whether it is poetry or fiction or reportage or criticism. He has great enthusiasm for new technologies as well as a steadfast commitment to literature and exceptional journalism.

In an age when the media gives too much emphasis to getting the story out first rather than getting it out correctly, Ralph has devoted himself to publishing works of permanence—just as VQR has.

“A fine writer and scholar, Ralph Eubanks is the perfect editor to carry on the tradition of excellence at VQR,” U.S. Poet Laureate and VQR contributing editor Natasha Trethewey said. “I look forward to seeing his vision manifest in its pages.”

At the Library of Congress, Ralph has managed the publication of more than 80 nonfiction books on American history, photography, maps, and film in collaboration with leading trade publishers. Sharing VQR’s commitment to photography and photojournalism, he managed the recent publication of nine Farm Security Administration photography books in the Library’s “Fields of Vision” series with introductions from contemporary authors such as Nicholas Lemann, George Packer, Francine Prose, and Annie Proulx.

“Ralph has a deep understanding of how writers practice their craft,” said William R. Ferris, former chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. “He also knows how to shape the work of a writer. In his capacity as both an editor and an author, Ralph has witnessed the evolving landscape of book and magazine publishing. In response to those changes, he adopted an agile publishing model for the Library of Congress that changed and evolved with the needs of the market and readers.”

“Ralph Eubanks has a clear sense of what makes VQR a great magazine—and the vision necessary to make it even better. He will also be a superb addition to the University community as a cultural leader,” said Thomas C. Skalak, UVA’s Vice President for Research, whose office oversees VQR.

Ralph said being named editor of VQR is “both an honor and a challenge.”

“It is an honor because of the publication’s storied 88-year history, having published many of my personal literary heroes, like Eudora Welty, John Berryman, and D.H. Lawrence,” he said. “It is a challenge because I will be editing a general-interest magazine in the digital age. The distinct challenge of a general-interest literary publication is to remain ‘general’ while carving out a recognizable niche in the marketplace. I believe that VQR should be a publication that publishes both timeless and contemporary content. The content must be substantive, not trendy, yet it must still reflect the times.”

In addition to his broad experience in the publishing industry, Eubanks is the author of two well-received memoirs, Ever Is a Long Time: A Journey Into Mississippi’s Dark Past and The House at the End of the Road: The Story of Three Generations of an Interracial Family in the American South. Washington Post book critic Jonathan Yardley named Ever Is a Long Time one of the best nonfiction books of 2003. Regarding Eubanks’ second memoir, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Richard Ford stated that it “enacts the liberating magic of literature: it finds its truth in between conventional wisdom and sociological presumption.”

Eubanks has many ties to the University of Virginia. He served on the advisory board of the Publishing and Communications Program from 1993 to 2002 and taught several courses over eight years as an adjunct faculty member, including an overview of book, journal, and magazine publishing. He served on the program committee for “Exploring the New Media,” a joint Library of Congress/UVA annual conference from 1994 to 2000.

Ralph’s first issue as editor will be the Fall 2013 issue. Fittingly, it will include an extensive interview with the late southern writer Eudora Welty, whose work has meant a great deal to Ralph throughout his career.

One of the most common questions I’m asked is, “Should I hire a book publicist?” Whether I am speaking at a conference or tweeting about the state of book publishing, writers are often fickle when it comes to the hows and whys of the publicity for their book. I can’t say I blame them—it seems like there is a new “platform” every five minutes along with articles about the death of newspapers. Though it may seem difficult, there are some things one should know before working with a publicist.

Understand the basics of what a publicist does.
While my job is a bit tough to describe to my five-year-old, it is not shrouded in mystery. Publicists are the individuals who help craft a pitch for your book; we are audience curators, media connectors, news junkies, blog researchers, idea think tanks, and most importantly, we are readers.

Write a list of goals you would like to achieve by hiring a publicist.
One of the first questions I ask potential clients is, “What are your goals for yourself/your book?” If you are thinking about hiring a publicist, you must first know why you want to hire one. Is it to help with review coverage? Place op-eds? Consult with you about your online presence? My suggestion is to make two lists—the first should be an absolute wish list. Write down the biggest and best things you would like to see happen for your book. The second list should be the nuts and bolts of what you envision for your publicity campaign. Think it through: based on what you know about book-review sections, do you think your book has a shot at getting reviewed in print? Can you write something topical that a publicist can place as an op-ed? Are you willing to spend some time learning how to use Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit (among others) to promote your book? These are just a few considerations to keep in mind.

Know that you will have to spend money.
After I have an initial phone consultation with an author and she requests a proposal from me, I make sure I create a plan that is comprehensive and customized for her, which includes the fee I will charge for my work. This is where things get tricky. While I understand authors have limited budgets (doesn’t everyone?), I also want to point out the economics of being a freelance publicist: If we are paid well, we do not have to take on loads of projects to make up income. If we start lowering our fees to accommodate everyone’s budgetary limits, we have to take on a lot of extra work. The scenario an author should want is the one where a publicist is paid well for the work and can put a lot of focus on his project. If you shortchange your publicist, you are shortchanging yourself.

Be flexible.
Part of a good publicist’s job is to have honest conversations with clients. If a campaign isn’t working, perhaps it’s time to change the focus. For instance, if print editors are not reacting to pitches, maybe it’s time to move on and think of other ways to make people aware of the book. There are loads of books published every year, and only a fraction of them are reviewed. Of those books reviewed, most, if not all, are released by major publishing houses. If you are a self-published author, your chances of being reviewed by the New York Times are pretty slim. This does not mean all is lost; it just means the strategy for promoting your book needs to be fluid. The best author-publicist relationships are partnerships where each party has a vested interested in the outcome of the campaign and can openly discuss what may or may not be working.

A day in the life of a publicist.
When I compile status reports for my clients, I include information about what has been done on their behalf—not only contacting the media, but making copies, stuffing envelopes, lugging packages to the UPS Store. Mundane? Yes. Necessary? Absolutely. What most authors don’t realize is that while it may seem like a publicist is being too quiet, it doesn’t mean we are not working. We are always working. The fact is, most pitching is done via e-mail these days, and that is pretty time consuming. A publicist can send out between fifty and one hundred e-mails pitching people and maybe, if they are lucky, get a handful of replies. If it sounds dreadful, it is. No publicist worth her salt will guarantee results—she will, however, guarantee a herculean effort to get people to pay attention to your book.

We’ve earned your business, now trust us.
If you hire a publicist who has quite a few years of experience under his belt, you should take stock in the counsel he gives you when it comes to press materials, following up with contacts, book events, format, pricing, etc. I am a firm believer in author-publicist communication, but there is a point when you have to let us do our job. We will always respect your opinion on how you think your book should be pitched, but we also know the people to whom we are pitching. What you may think is a great Today show pitch might be an absolute stinker to the producer there. A good publicist knows what to pitch where—and what their contacts are looking for in regards to guests, interviews, reviews, and content.

Publicists don’t ever set out for a book to fail, but we are often on the receiving end of much blame when things don’t go exactly as the author had planned. It does count that we follow-up a dozen times with our contacts even when they don’t respond. It also counts that we advise authors on various aspects of the publication process. We are therapists, assistants, travel agents, and media mavens all wrapped up in one package. And that is worth every penny.

——

About the author: Kathleen Schmidt has over 15 years of experience in the publishing industry. Currently, she is CEO of KMSPR, a book publicity firm. Find her on Twitter: @Bookgirl96 or @kmspr.

The following post is part of our online companion to our Spring 2013 issue on The Business of Literature. Click here for an overview of the issue.

——
We met as fans, which is to say that we read each other’s writing and wished for more of it in the world. Few of us have met each other in person, although it’s always a bit of a jolt when we do—we’ve known each other’s minds and words, but have only had a thumbnail image of what those brains were wrapped in. The speaking voice is always a shock.

We talk up each other’s books and repost each other’s new publications on Facebook and Twitter. When we’re struggling with some business-related detail or see an interesting call for submissions, we call out on social media, “Hey, writer friends!” When we’re struggling with mojo gone missing, we look to the community for reassurance.

We’ve heard the gripe that there are too many writers—so many, in fact, that agents can’t read more than a paragraph of our manuscripts before making a decision. Editors take upwards of a year to respond. No one gets paid well because there are so many of us willing to work for free.

What are we to do? It’s not as if we’re going to be manipulated into participating in some literary hunger game, where the last one standing gets a plum regular writing gig with one of the big magazines or a juicy book deal.

Is there jealousy among us? Probably, because we’re human, although we agree it’s bad form to talk about it publicly. The jealousy was worse when were younger; we’re all now far enough along that we can recognize that only we can write what we’re writing. When we read somebody’s work that makes our teeth hurt with its awesomeness, it’s not exactly jealousy that overcomes us. It’s a certain kind of wistfulness, a certain awareness of what we lack in our own toolboxes. A sense of humor that makes the reader giddy. A doggedness in reporting. A talent for synthesizing seemingly unrelated ideas into a gorgeous piece of writing. A precise eye for detail, an intellectual edge, an ability to master more than one genre.

We writer friends, we swoon over each other.

•••

However, there are some unspoken rules.

These rules can be summed up with the overarching theme of Act Like a Normal Person.

We don’t know what it is about publishing that makes some writers lose both their minds and common sense, but many of us have been victim to another writer’s bad manners. The more successful among us have felt the weight of other writers trying to ride our coattails.

The rest of us have endured conferences where other writers try to establish their importance, aren’t interested in an actual conversation, and vampire the energy from the room. We’ve spoken with writers who drop the phrase “my agent” so many times, one might suspect the two were lovers. We’ve been cut off mid-sentence at the mere appearance of someone better known than us. We’ve had writers we don’t even know ask big favors. We understand the blurb requests that come out of nowhere—we’ve been there ourselves—but the demands to post an Amazon review, the insistence that we publicize work when there’s been no reciprocal effort, the incessant social media without a glimmer of the human life behind it? It irritates us because it undermines our wish to be generous.

And we want to be generous—it’s practically the only currency we have. We’ve all been the recipients of good will from writer-mentors who’ve gone before us. We don’t dole out our editorial contacts to just anyone, but we have soft spots for people who are just starting out. But, while it sounds terrible to say, the key is to know your place. Put another way: if you’re a community theater actor, you don’t tweet to Meryl Streep that you’d appreciate a shot to co-star in her latest movie.

•••

People say the power is shifting from the publishing industry professionals to the writers themselves. One of the more compelling bits we’ve seen on the subject was by comedian/actor/writer Patton Oswalt. In a talk at the 2012 Just for Laughs Festival, Oswalt read two letters—one to his fellow comedians and another to the gatekeepers.

(You can watch the talk here or see a fan’s transcription of it here.)

To his community, he wrote, in part:

I need to decide more career stuff for myself and make it happen for myself, and I need to stop waiting to luck out and be given. I need to unlearn those muscles.

We’re seeing this notion take form in a lot of our friends. A lot of you out there. You, for instance, the person we’re writing to. Your podcast is amazing. Your videos on your YouTube channel are getting better and better every single one that you make, just like when we did open mics, better and better every week. Your Twitter feed is hilarious.

To the gatekeepers, he wrote:

In a couple of years it’s going to be f—g equal. I see what’s f—g coming. This isn’t a threat; this is an offer. We like to create. We’re the ones who love to make shit all the time. You’re the ones who like to discover it and patronize it support it and nurture it and broadcast it. Just get out of our way when we do it.

This applies to us writers as well.

We’re seeing it happening. Some of the most exciting short-form writing out there is coming out of writer communities. The Nervous Breakdown began as a literary community headed by Brad Listi. The Rumpus was founded by Stephen Elliott and a cohort of his friends. Dear Teen Me started as a project founded by E. Kristin Anderson and Miranda Keaneally, who’ve gone on to publish an anthology of primarily young adult authors writing letters to their teen selves. And those are just a few groups of writer friends finding ways to reach an audience.

Some of us are part of these communities, and some of us aren’t. But all of us are beginning to understand what we can do as a collective. We talk about VIDA (itself a community) and figure out the markets that do or don’t want us. We discuss the new realities of publishing: some of us are frustrated that few of us can make a living wage writing; others of us know, in our heart of hearts, that we were never going to make a living wage with our work anyway. We talk contracts and fees and all the little details that kept us in our figurative isolated rooms with the pen and notebook.

The talk of the nitty gritty is essential, but our bonds are made from the intangibles. We take heart when someone whose work we admire receives rejection, just like the rest of us. We’re the ones who advise each other to get as revved up about the potential good news as much as we want; it won’t sting any less if the deal doesn’t go through. We’re the living examples of writers whose prose has gotten better—deeper, more gripping, more assured—over the years. It’s easy to get drained of our individual dreams. Essentially, we writer friends are the spigot of hope.

——

About the author: Jennifer Niesslein (@jniesslein) is a writer and editor living in Charlottesville, Virginia; she blogs regularly for VQR. Visit her website at jenniferniesslein.com.