LitMinds Blog and Interviews

Cane River, the first effort of Lalita Tademy, is a historical novel depicting four generations of Creole women living in rural, central Louisiana.  The book gained broad national attention in 2001 when it became an Oprah Book Club selection and a New York Times Bestseller.

Recently, LitMinds had an opportunity to interview Lalita Tademy when her book was selected by the city of San Francisco for its "One City, One Book " reading program.  The honor is accompanied by two months of events including book discussions and author appearances around San Francisco.

By way of background, Lalita Tademy was a senior executive at Sun Microsystems before she left the corporate world and embarked on a family research project.  After years of painstaking historical research she decided to write a book ... Cane River to tell her ancestors' story.  Earlier this year she published a second historical fiction novel Red River which is also set in Louisiana.

In this no-holds barred interview with Lalita we covered a wide range of topics - the significance of San Francisco's decision to select her book, becoming a writer after a successful corporate career, racism in America today, the ongoing battles between literary freedom and racial sensitivity, and of course we did ask her how she wrote such a fascinating novel.

Enjoy!


Congratulations on having Cane River selected by the city of San Francisco for the One City, One Book program.  How does it feel?
Thank you, it was a surprise.  I’m thrilled.  One of the reasons that this was important to me was that I’ve actually traveled around to a lot of cities since 2001 when my first book was published.  Many cities have named days after me and presented with me keys to the city.  And [until now] San Francisco was never really very excited about my work.  So, I was really excited to get this recognition from my home ground.

Why do you think San Francisco was late to embrace Cane River?  Which other cities or regions showed the most enthusiasm for the book?
I’m not totally sure about San Francisco.  There were pockets of the country that just were more aware of the book.  There were pockets where there was more enthusiasm and publicity.  And [of course], some of it is very serendipitous.  I don’t think there was a Machiavellian effort.  I think that it just got a lot of play in other places.  I know there was wild enthusiasm  with the first book associated with Oprah choosing it.  And, that enthusiasm translated in some places more than others. 

St. Louis was really enthusiastic.  Louisville had the mayor name a day after me.  In Louisiana where both of my books stories are based, in New Orleans and central Louisiana, I got just a huge reception.  And, I’m not sure why but, in Denver and in Texas I got a great reception.

It wasn’t anything by design.  It just never felt the same level here that I felt in other parts of the country.  And, I can’t even conjecture as to why that would be.  A lot of these things are just timing and what you just stumble into.  So I don’t have any systematic pattern; its really just an observation.  I’m just really thrilled now that it will get some recognition in San Francisco.

Do you think the book and some of its messages are relevant today?

I sure do.  And, it’s one of the reasons I’m attracted to historical fiction.  I really like all sorts of fiction but I really have a soft spot for historical fiction.  It’s not just going back in time and looking at a period in history…  For me, I like to figure out what that has to do with today if anything, e.g. setting precedents, if there was something we can change as individuals, communities, as nations, that might have changed how history unfolded.

In Red River specifically, there is a community waiting for the federal government to come in and to back what they did for voting rights.  This was after the Civil War in the early 1870s.  And before the book came out, I actually saw the images of Katrina when it hit.  And, here were all of these faces and they were looking up saying "Where’s our government? We thought that we could count on this. And, it’s not there.”  To me it was striking because it was Louisiana again and it was on a subset of the population that really was left adrift for a very long time.  I do think that in history you can see the beginnings of many behaviors that still exist a hundred, two hundred years later.

If you could use just a few words to tell readers why they should read Cane River, what would you say?

I think that Cane River is interesting on a couple of levels.   I think it is interesting just as a good, fast, exciting read. It’s a historical novel but it’s written so it’s a page turner. And you want to find out what happens next and you are invested in the characters.  And, its multiple generations of women; in this case, colored Creole slave women who every generation manage to provide for a better life for their children.  It is very rich in historical context; and it really gives you a sense of a time and a place in history.

In Cane River, you really manage to get into the mindset of your ancestors.  It’s one thing to do genealogical research and look at county records and other historical documents but to really transpose yourself a hundred fifty years ago, and pick up the whole language and mindset is real accomplishment.  How did you manage that?
These became real breathing, vibrant people to me.  And, I had to become each one of them in order to write about them.   I had to actually populate the minds of these as characters.  And, history to me is not nearly as interesting if you don’t have the human interaction.  What intrigued me about this time and these particular circumstances was why people made the decisions they made, how they were really living.  I did an incredible amount of research to get the facts and to reconstruct their everyday lives.

It took me nine months to write the first draft of this book.  And I spent those nine months everyday, never a break, on a plantation, during the Civil War, during the reconstruction, or in the Jim Crow South.  I was totally immersed in this world.

How did you get to the actual language used?
I went back to Louisiana and in this community Cane River which [is] a real place.  And just listened to people and how they talked, and the kind of phrasing they used.  I read books of that period to get the mood and the feel and the tone.  Which was really important for me to recreate.

How did you learn to write and the art of storytelling?  You come from a corporate background, have you been writing for a long time and was Cane River the first thing you wrote?
Well, some of the business plans I wrote were pretty much fiction [laughter].  Truthfully, I had never really written even a short story before.  And, when I left the corporate world, I didn’t leave to write.  I left because I wanted to do something different and to have my life go in a different direction.  And, the way I learned to write, not because I’d been writing all along or I had a burning passion to write, but it was because the story was so compelling to me as I did my family research.  And, I thought it was such a big story that I needed to learn to write to tell it.  So the story came first. 

I learned to write through trial and error.   I loved to read so I knew there were books I loved.  I knew there was something, I didn’t know it was called the "narrative arc" but I knew there was storytelling and pacing and dialogue.  So, when I first sat down I had a notebook for the four women in it.  And, I kept a diary for each one.  For example, “My name is Emily and I need to go out to milk the cow.”  I would just pretend that I was the woman and I’d write about myself and my life.

When I had, more or less, a feel for who they were individually, because they were different generations, I would put the two of them in a room together and have them talk to one another.  I would have no idea what they were going to say.   And, I’d try figure it out as I went along.  It turned out that some [of the characters] had very soft voices, and some had very aggressive loud voices; some were very opinionated and some were very accommodating. Then, their personalities really started blossoming and developing.  And, the characters really took me forward into the story I wanted to tell.

Did you take a writing class?
Well finally.  I didn’t for just so long it was ridiculous.  I took a creative writing class, an extension class that met five times at Stanford University which is near where I live.  It was evening class. And, that was just to learn the technical terms and to get some structure around what I was trying to do.  I did that and every week there was a homework assignment.  And, I would do the homework assignment.  And every week the instructor would read my work.

And then, I sent one of them into the San Francisco Chronicle and it was published.  I submitted another homework assignment to the Palo Alto weekly and it won a short story contest.  And, that gave me the confidence to keep going.  So, I took a private workshop down here.

But, it wasn’t until I took a UC Berkeley extension course in San Francisco after I was finished with the draft and had re-written it several times…  In a novel writing workshop, not just a creative writing workshop, the instructor read my sample chapter and said "this is wonderful, how much of it do you have."  And I said "well, the whole thing."  And she said, "I want to introduce you to my agent."  And, that’s how I got my first agent!

As someone who started writing fairly late in life and still became a very successful writer…What advice do you have for other new, emerging writers?  It seems that there are more and more people who think they have a book in them.
The biggest thing I can advise to a writer ‘wannabe’ is to write.  People talk about it a lot or they say I have a story or they say if my pencils were just a little sharper I could get this down… and the end of the day, the two things a writer needs to do is to write and to read.

They can polish their skills. They don’t have to enroll in a MFA program. They can take a local course, join a writing group, they can do any of a number of things.  But, at the end of the day, its you and your pen, or pencil, or computer, or your Crayola or whatever it is and just digging deep and getting it down.

In your author notes to Cane River, you said that Emily fascinated you for years.  And, you found it difficult to embrace what your mother had said about her being ‘an elegant lady.’  Why was it difficult to reconcile elegance with what you call being ‘color struck?’
To me elegance, is not just physical appearance.  To me elegance is a grace of physical being and spiritual being.  And, whenever anyone talked about Emily, not just my mother or her brothers, if I would go back to this small town a neighbor would say I remember her.  It was always very reverential.  It didn’t just reconcile with an ugly way of thought, of lighter skin being better than darker skin.  It just seemed very constricting and provincial.

Now, after I had to inhabit who she was, and who she came from and the times in which she was born, I changed my attitude dramatically.  But at the time, looking at it through 20th century eyes, to me the two didn’t just go together.  You weren’t elegant and able to have those kinds of restrictive attitudes.

What do you mean by ‘color struck’?
This book takes place in Louisiana and of all states in the U.S., Louisiana is one of the foremost in making distinctions between shades of skin tone.  So for example, back in the day, before you could actually be admitted to a club, not a country club, just a club where you were going to socialize…  You couldn’t go to a white club because there was no mixing of any kind.  But even if you went to an African-American club, they had what they called the paper bag test.  And that is, they would hold a paper bag up, if you were darker you couldn’t get in, if you were lighter you could get in and socialize with people of your same skin tone.  These are fine distinctions that are difficult to understand for anyone that hasn’t grown up that way.

Color Struck is where you are aware and participate in making those distinctions between skin tones.  And the bottom line of it is, lighter is better.

Do you think people are still ‘color struck’ today?
Yes, I think its not nearly what it used to be, but it still exists.  It still exists in pockets, and it still exists certainly by age.  Certain younger generations don’t see this as anything other than an anachronism but there are people of my generation and older that are very aware of it.  Again, not all, but it IS in pockets.

What impact do you think that a person’s color has today on their identity?
I think its lessening and mutating in the way that racial consciousness mutates and racism mutates.  Hopefully, its becoming less pernicious, but that doesn’t mean its gone.

Is ‘color struck’ the same as racism? Or are they different?  Is one a subset of another?
No racism is institutionalized.  Color struck can be a personal reaction.  These are my definitions.  Racism to me is something that is institutionalized, and a whole series of exclusions.

Do you think that we have racism in America today?
Yes, absolutely.  It’s still there.  It’s there in stereotyping, in profiling, in reactions.  And, the way in which two people walk into an interview, what each of them set off in terms of their physical appearance, how the interviewer views them, what the interviewer thinks their capabilities are.

I have felt racism everywhere.  I don’t think that held me back.  I’m not talking about someone unleashing the dogs, or running you out of town, or suggesting a lynching.  Nothing that blatant or obvious.  I do think that there are suppositions and attitudes that are needed to be battled.  And, sometimes its surprising where it is, and where it isn’t.

I do think people form opinions before you ever speak a word.  Either based on their prior experience, or there imagination of what that experience might be.

It might be basic human behavior but when it spills over as a major barrier for a whole class of people then I think that the basic human behavior may need to be modified.  I think there has to be proactive measures to protect people if they are being systematically excluded.

There is a lot of controversy every time the ‘n’ word is used in the public.  Are we really addressing the core issues around race or are we circumventing the issues and obsessing over specific words?
For Cane River and Red River, I had to address whether or not to use the ‘n’ word.  Because, in terms of authenticity, the ‘n’ word was used a lot at the time, it was just a descriptor.  And, I decided that was a piece of authenticity that I was willing to give up.  I didn’t want to add to that that, as an author, I didn’t want to be a part of it.  I rewrote a lot to avoid using that.

I used it twice in Cane River and left it out of Red River altogether.  I used it as a hypen - for example, “n-- lover.”  I used it for single emphasis.

And, I remember when I read Huckleberry Finn, it was very tough to see it in print.  And I understand  both sides of the issue in literature and authenticity and trying to capture the times but, I did not want to overuse it.

What do you think about all the classics like Huckleberry Finn that have the ‘n’ word?
Well they are already out there. And you could do what they did for the Nancy Drew series, because a lot of them showed some unflattering cultural attitudes, you could completely revamp them.  But, I personally don’t think they are stories we need to rewrite.

What was your mother’s reaction to the book?
If she had her druthers, I’d still be working in corporate America and getting a paycheck every other Friday.  Her view was two-fold, it is a personal story I’m telling.  Granted everyone is gone, is dead.  But it was our family and she couldn’t understand why I would write about that and share it with strangers.  And second, she was uncomfortable with me revisiting slavery.  Because she sacrificed a great deal so I could get enough of an education, and a good job, and be a respectable member of the community.  And why I would want to go and in her words ‘stir up all that old mess’ was something she had a very difficult time understanding.

Although, I do want to say that she supported me.  It wasn’t something she was please with my choice, but she totally supported me as her daughter.  And, my mother was actually pleased once she understood that I could make a living and support myself.  There hasn’t been an author in the family before so it wasn’t something that was well understood.  So there was some pride in it too.

How did writing the book impact you?
I think it opened me up a lot.  In order to write this, I had to be all the characters, the white and the black characters.  And I think it opened me up to being so judgmental.  It helped me to see that it is all a pile of gray.
 

Is there anything else you would like us to communicate to the readers and writers in the LitMinds community?
No, I think you covered a lot of new ground.  Thank you for the interview.

Thank you.

You can find more information about Cane River, Lalita's second book Red River, and her San Francisco appearances on the One City, One Book site here and the author's website here.  Click here to see Lalita's LitMinds profile.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Posted by Christin at 11:30 PM | Permalink

While the daily news headlines remind us of the US role in the Middle East, most of us are much less familiar with the people and culture of the region.  At a time when the US is tied up in a seemingly endless war in Iraq, and the media is obsessing over a guessing game of George Bush’s policy towards Iran, some of us at LitMinds think we should be working towards better understanding the common people from this region.  Even in the most democratic of nations, politicians represent only a proxy for the voice of the common people.  And for authoritarian regimes like Iran, it would be a huge mistake to assume that their politicians speak for more than a small minority of people.  So, who are the common people of Iran, what are they like, how are they similar or different than us?  For answers, we turn (predictably) to the world of literature and books as it offers the keys to understanding this region that has been responsible for great beauty and art. 

So, we decided to interview Zara Houshmand, a noted theater artist, who recently co-authored a memoir about Iranian artist Monir Farmanfarmaian.  In the words of Tom Reiss, author of The Orientalist, “This thought-provoking, heartbreaking, delightful memoir spirits us across the battlefield of today’s headlines into a kaleidoscopic landscape of Iran in all its magical richness. Monir Farmanfarmaian boldly follows her dream of becoming an artist in the West before following love back to a new Iran. Like a Persian Audrey Hepburn, she recounts her adventures among boorish fanatics, elegant spies, celebrities, and, best of all, her own eccentric family, with a combination of plainspoken pluck and grace under pressure that is inspiring and irresistible.”

This interview was conducted by our fellow LitMind, Dr. Persis Karim.  Enjoy!

Q: Tell us a bit about Monir's extraordinary story.
A: It’s the story of a woman whose curiosity, creativity, and fearless spirit defy the Western stereotypes of Middle-Eastern women as powerless victims.  Privilege and wealth made a difference in Monir’s life, but they weren’t constant—for long stretches she struggled like the rest of us.  The bigger difference is that she is wonderfully resourceful and resilient.  Her natural creativity, perseverance, and sense of humor extract her from the most difficult circumstances that history throws at her—and the history covered is most of twentieth-century Iran, as well as an insider’s view of the New York art scene mid-century.

Monir’s story is also a portrait of an artist—the unique visual magic of how an artist sees and remembers, how the creative process unfolds from moment to moment, and how making art strengthens one against life’s challenges, whether the indignities of a bad relationship or a tragedy that shatters your whole life.  And in Monir’s case, that creative lens also looks deeply into Iranian culture, its traditions and aesthetic, offering a view much richer than any single artist’s work. 

Q: How did you come to this project of co-authoring the memoir of Monir Farmanfarmaian's life? What made it compelling to you?
A: Monir has probably been told a thousand times, from listeners entranced by bits and pieces of her story, that her life would make an amazing book.  When she finally decided to do it and asked for my help, I was intrigued, naturally—I’ve known Monir and her art for thirty years, and traveled in her footsteps through the remoter parts of Iran. 

But I had doubts at first. The Farmanfarmaian name is closely linked to the Shah’s regime, and I had no desire to play the porter for that set of political baggage.  Of course, the problem vanishes if you know Monir, but I feared that Iranians would rush to judgement without reading the book.  If you read it, you’ll know that Monir stands at a certain subversive angle to her powerful in-laws, and her irreverent sense of humor offers a fresh take on life at the top.

Ultimately, two things convinced me that I couldn’t not write this book.  One was Monir’s assurance that I would have complete creative freedom in the writing, insofar as possible with nonfiction.  As an artist herself, she understands what that means and values it.  The second, the real clincher, was when she told me her father’s story—how his faith in Islam was shaken to the root at his mother’s death, how it turned him into an activist for women’s rights at the beginning of the last century, and ultimately shaped Monir’s own free spirit.  That story moved me very deeply and was so ripe with a larger meaning—how could I resist?

Q: What are some of the challenges of co-authorship that you hadn't considered before you started this writing project?
Although Monir is a marvelously animated story-teller in person, very little of that came through in the transcript of our interviews, in part because her English is limited.  I had to create a voice that captured her personality and sense of humor, her sharply observant way of looking at the world and her charismatic presence.  For the purposes of the book, I knew her voice had to be as expressive verbally as her art is visually.  I had plenty of information in front of me, but it wasn’t in the form of words, and I had to somehow translate all those visual cues—the art itself, her tone of voice and body language, the subtext of thoughts implied by her actions, into a consistent and lifelike verbal style.

            But overall, there were more unforeseen rewards than unexpected challenges.  We became very close friends in the process of working together, not least because of the confidence she placed in me and because so much of what she told me was coming out for the first time, memories that she had never shared with anyone before.  The ending of the book was also a wonderful surprise, events unfolding in real time after I had completed a first draft and which provided a delightful resolution that so rarely graces a true story. 

Q: What were some of the ways that you felt like the author of this text vs. the subject? Did these lines ever get blurred for you?
If a memoir is to succeed in literary terms, it can’t be just a retrospective diary. You need to be selective about what you include, and you need to find the narrative arc that’s buried in the details.  In other words, you need to make judgments about the meaning of this life, why it’s worth telling.  In our interviews, Monir offered very little in the way of self-reflection—I often had to tease that out by implication.  I also had to make choices about what really mattered, where she offered little perspective.  It felt like a huge burden of responsibility at times, finding this core of meaning and bringing it to the foreground with a light touch.  Sometime I felt like I was an actor developing a role, looking for the aspects of my own personality that resonated with her script—the actual transcript of events as she had told them—so that I could let the voice come naturally and spontaneously.  And then constantly checking that I wasn’t imposing my own ideas inappropriately.

I also relied a lot on my own memories of Iran—the landscape, the sense memories of smell and flavor and texture and the quality of the light, as well as the unique style of human interactions.  It certainly helped that I had known Monir in the 70s in Tehran, lived at the fringes of the art scene there that she describes, and also traveled around the country much as she did.  (I was working at the time with a photographer who often traveled with Monir, and we retraced many of the routes she describes.)  She could communicate with me in a kind of shorthand:  “You remember the light on the mountains there, how it changed?” “Yes.” From that one reference I might write a paragraph.

Q: What is your next project?
I’m working on a novel, set in the eleventh century, about a sea journey made by a Buddhist monk who travels from India to Indonesia… It’s premature to talk about it, except to say that I’m having the best time of my life.

You can see Zara’s LitMinds profile here.  She will be doing a reading and book signing at the Booksmith in San Francisco on Wednesday September 12th and at Diesel bookstore in Oakland on Thursday September 13th.

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Sean Finney and Mia Lipman are the editors of Canteen magazine, “the literary magazine that comes with instructions.” They met nearly a decade ago while working as tech reporters in San Francisco. They celebrated Canteen’s launch earlier this year and already have more to celebrate: the journal was named “Best New Local Publication About the Arts” by San Francisco magazine, and it has been covered in The San Francisco Chronicle, Utne Reader, ArtBusiness.com and Design Arts Daily.

Canteen, according to its mission statement, “aims to engage readers with both the arts and the creative process.” We sat down with Sean and Mia recently to talk about a range of topics, from Canteen’s birth from New York gambling money (really), to what it’s like to run a literary journal, to why there are so many fistfights in the San Francisco poetry scene (again, really).

Tell us a little about the origins of the magazine.

SEAN: Canteen has the perhaps unique distinction of being named after a San Francisco restaurant, but being backed by New York gambling money. 

How did that happen? Those seem like two disparate entities.

SEAN: Well, they made us an offer we couldn’t refuse. No, basically my friend Dennis Leary, who was the chef of Rubicon, started a small but well-reviewed restaurant called Canteen, and wanted that restaurant to be more than just a foodie pilgrimage site. So he has shelves of books in there – and he’s quite a good writer himself, and he has an article in this first issue.  

And I put together these literary banquets, where what we wanted to do was have the feel of the back room in a Parisian restaurant. We would lure these famous writers to give what we called intercourse readings, and we’d have two people read in the middle of the meals, like Andy Greer, Simone Ali, Joyce Maynard. That’s how we started to build up a stable of writers. And Stephen Pierson, our publisher, was one of the guests, and he said, “Sean, do you want to start a magazine?” And I said yes.

Just like that? 

SEAN: Well, some time passed. (Laughter) And Mia came in and saved us from just talking about it, transformed talk into action.

Will Canteen the restaurant ever have a poker night? A casino night, maybe? 

SEAN: We haven’t approached them about that yet. But they’re selling the magazine.

You mentioned that you lured all of these writers to the literary banquets. How did you lure them?  

SEAN: Food!

Did you cold-call people? Or did you have contacts? 

SEAN: Basically, you have a friend of a friend who’s a famous writer, and once you get one big name you use that name to attract other names. And I think people like the idea of this private literary banquet.

MIA: And Dennis has gotten a great deal of press also, so people would have known who he was and wanted to eat there.

How long have these dinners have been going on? 

SEAN: We did about three or four, and then we switched to cocktail parties. And some of those were readings, too. We had Peter Orner and Joyce Maynard…

MIA: The woman who did the memoir about her father, Rachel Howard… 

SEAN: But we never got, like, Coetzee to come down from Stanford. But we’ll see! No Nobel Prize winners yet.

But after this interview… 

SEAN: Oh, yes. (Laughter)

MIA: But it was very much the same thing with Canteen [magazine]. Once Sean had secured pieces from Andy [Andrew Sean Greer] and Po [Bronson], getting other writers and telling them, “This is the company you’ll be in,” was considerably easier.

Let’s talk about the angle of the magazine. Why exactly did you choose this angle? And also, why do you think it’s so important? 

SEAN: The tagline for the magazine is “the state of creation,” and that refers to how the magazine has new work, but we also try to get pieces that reveal something of the creative process. It seems like people aren’t content to merely be in the audience. Most people who come to readings, whether it’s fiction, or especially poetry, are writers themselves, so they’re all waiting their turn. And people often have an incredible willingness to pay tens of thousand of dollars for master of fine arts degrees from every single obscure college under the sun, yet they have trouble buying books sometimes. So we figured, heck – we’ll give them an MFA between covers.

MIA: And also there’s the element of that slightly voyeuristic preference on the part of the American public now. They’re less likely to pick up a work of fiction than to read an article about the author in Vanity Fair or a People cover story. In some ways, while you could call that a sad or downward trend, it also becomes necessary to – for lack of a better word – to capitalize on that. If people are so fascinated by that behind-the-scenes look, then if we can do that in a way that also encourages them to read fiction and to read poetry and to read the results of that process, then we’re doing good work.  

I felt like that was a niche that hadn’t been filled, or at least was only being filled minimally. There’s also the trend of do-it-yourself household magazines, so this is our literary take on that, in a way. Sean came up with the first line of our mission statement, of Canteen being a literary magazine that comes with instructions.

Tell us about that. What does that mean? 

SEAN: We mean that in featuring essays that reveal something about how known writers have completed their own work, it’s akin to getting a set of instructions for your own practice. There aren’t any literal instructions in there – though maybe in the Julie Orringer piece, where she dissects with her husband, Ryan Harty, their refrigerator magnet poem.

SEAN: That’s the closest to actual instruction that we have. But we hope that there’s an instructive but not pedantic spirit in the magazine.  

So you hope to inspire people to write more – you’ve mentioned not only a voyeuristic impulse –

SEAN: We’re amoral. We’re very amoral. (Laughter) I mean, there’s enough people writing as is, so…

MIA: Well, I hope we do. And I want people to send us their stuff. Everyone that I’ve talked to out here that’s part of the young writing community – and lord knows that’s enormous in the Bay Area – and the people from whom I’ve seen the most enthusiastic response for this, have been artists and writers themselves. Because they think not only that [Canteen] is an interesting object and beautiful object – and it’s a small venture, so they want to support that – but it’s also the idea of, “Hey, I could be in there.” Because it’s accessible enough to them. 

We wanted to make something that was aesthetically beautiful and felt a little more expensive and more valuable, so people not only would want to pick it up and read it, but also aspire to be inside it. At least I know that’s one of my hopes when people pick it up, especially the writing community.

Mia, you mentioned earlier the art portfolios that are included in the magazine. How do you feel like that ties in with the writing that’s in there, and why did you want that to be such a strong component?

MIA: Well, in terms of approaching both the creative process and the results of that process, we wanted to include essays in here that not only describe what people did in terms of coming to their writing or their art – and we hope to get painters, musicians, other types of art forms…for future issues – we also wanted to showcase the results of that process. 

SEAN: And the reason the magazine looks the way it does is because the four of us at Canteen thought that most literary magazines looked really boring. And that they weren’t very sexy. So we tried to make it more appealing and thus the square format, the deluxe paper, the fancy binding, the two-page gutter-jumping spreads that introduce each piece, even if it’s just a poem. We wanted it to be something that you would read, and also an object that you would desire, and you might want to put on your coffee table. Or wherever you keep your desirable objects.

So what’s the business model? There’s no advertising in the magazine, correct? And we also saw on your website that you’re set up as a not-for-profit. Is Stephen doing this out of the goodness of his heart? Putting his gambling money to good use?  

MIA: No, there’s no ads, and we’d love to keep it that way. It certainly was a discussion. Stephen can’t fund it until the end of time, but we’re hoping to keep it ad-free. And Stephen is doing this in part out of the goodness of his heart –

SEAN: But we’re still amoral. I insist upon that! 

MIA: I think that Stephen came to this from the perspective of a businessman with origins in writing. He was a journalist with us, he has written short stories of his own, he came to us with that background. So I think it’s a combination of not expecting it to be a huge moneymaking venture, but at least expecting it to be a sustainable business that he could be a part of, that also fulfilled his own artistic and literary leanings, as opposed to being a purely philanthropic thing. I think he’s got a personal connection to it. He’s certainly invested in what’s in here and how it looks, very much.

SEAN: We’re going to be the next McSweeney’s, but with more irony. 

We would love to give our readers the same kind of insight into your creative process that you’re trying to give your readers into the creative process of other writers. So – tell us about your day-to-day jobs. It sounds like a pretty cool thing, to run your own literary magazine. What do you actually do?

MIA: Well, there being only four of us, we do have pretty defined roles. Sean’s officially, as editor-in-chief, the acquirer of work. My role is officially as the setter of the schedule and the production and logistics person – so I’m responsible for nagging Sean about getting those pieces in, so we can launch them. I’m also the main liaison with our designer in terms of copyediting the pieces and getting them into production.  

SEAN: For issue two, we have Joyce Maynard writing an essay. So I’ll get it, do a once-over – what we call developmental editing. Maybe I’ll have some questions for her, I’ll say, “This is great, but you’re hinting at something here…even more intriguing, so can I bug you to push on that?” And even very busy writers are open to that. They want to be pushed a little. And then I send it to Mia.

MIA: Sean’s the big-picture read. 

SEAN: Does that mean you’re the little-picture read?

MIA: I’m the granular read. I’m the red-pen read. Grammar, house style. 

SEAN: Sometimes I mess up the grammar.

MIA: That’s where I come in! I’ve got your back, man. So we do bring different skills to the table in terms of the editorial process, which I think is why we work well together. We’ve worked together in various companies and capacities over the years. That’s a good partnership…. I was never a fiction writer or a poet, so Sean brings that perspective to it, which I appreciate a lot.

SEAN: And Stephen’s kind of the overseer – he likes to think he has veto power. We’ll see if he actually does. (Laughter)

What would success look like for Canteen? 

SEAN: To have a subscriber base…

MIA: To have it be self-sustaining, at the very least.  

SEAN: Having a subscriber base of what – thousands and thousands?

MIA: Probably thousands and thousands. For financial viability, and because of the paper we’re using. It’s very expensive to produce the magazine, we’re not making a big profit. Our margin’s very slim – and close to nonexistent, when it comes to being able to discount it [for bookstores] – the idea would be to get us to a strong enough subscriber base…  

SEAN: How many, Mia?

MIA: Well, 10 to 15 thousand – but that would be a pittance. Something like Maxim has a million.

You’re not Maxim, though, are you? 

MIA: Right. So success would not have to be that. But we’d like our fair share – for it to be able to pay for itself. And then if we got a profit someday, that would be fantastic.

SEAN: And we want to be mentioned in the New York Times, because we’ve read that forever.  

MIA: What would be ideal in my mind would be to get to the point of being able to be quarterly, which would mean pieces coming in and being offered to us. My ideal would be that people would be coming to us, and not just Joe Schmoe writer on the street who just got his MFA – although we love to read that stuff – but to have more established writers coming to us and saying, “I love this idea, I want to write a piece for you guys.”

SEAN: To discover the next Rimbaud.  

MIA: Exactly. The next Benjamin Kunkel. So that level of financial viability and interest from the writing community would be success in my eyes.

Where do you see literary magazines in terms of the literary world – what’s their position? Is it a really niche readership? 

SEAN: Maybe they should be incubators for talent, so the people higher up in the food chain should support them in some way.

You mean aside from reading them and offering novel contracts to the writers whose work they like? 

SEAN: Maybe that’s enough, but maybe their role is as an incubator. Now that you can get an endless flow of new work online, their traditional role as a way of reading something that’s newer than a book – I don’t know if that exists in the same way. You have to think about how the object functions. We tried to make a beautiful object that people would want to share and keep and show to their friends.

MIA: But it is certainly a niche; as Sean touched on earlier, it’s often a niche for other writers. The people I see most carrying literary magazines and reading them and talking about them are the people who want to be in them. It’s this somewhat self-serving but also symbiotic world where the people who are producing the magazine aren’t necessarily producing it to publish their own stuff, but are hoping that their peers are going to buy [it] and think, “I want to be in this, I’ll show it to my friends who also would want to be in this.” And the crowd who’s out there buying more than just four or five bestsellers every year – people who seek out independent booksellers and a new store or a new writer. 

SEAN: We’re hoping to get educated general-interest readers who aren’t in the closed-loop system of most literary magazines. We’re taking a little gamble there, and we’ll see how it pans out.

MIA: That’s where the creative process aspect comes in. If we were just publishing fiction and poetry in here, it wouldn’t be less worthy, and we’re happy to have that side-by-side with the creative process essays. But there’s the idea that people who wouldn’t buy a literary magazine or a poetry magazine might buy a magazine about how poets write or think, or that poet’s interesting life – like Po’s story about the suicidal reader. It wasn’t just a story about “This is how I write, this is what I do”; it hinged on [a] narrative and an intriguing thing that happened to him. So someone who wouldn’t necessarily pick up a piece of fiction by our writers might pick up an essay by [them] about how they work and what they’re thinking. It goes back to that voyeuristic element we talked about. 

SEAN: But – amoral voyeurism.

MIA: Actually, it seems like an exceptionally moral way to approach voyeurism. We’re not putting a houseful of teenage girls in the shower online, we’re peeking into people’s minds in a very different way, but hoping it will appeal in a similar way to a mass of people.

Isn’t there also something about time here? As people have less and less time to sit down and read, just due to the speed of things, couldn’t this idea of anthologies and short stories and literary magazines be marketed to a broader audience as a way to get your dose of quality thinking and writing? 

MIA: I’d say the success of the Best American series speaks directly to that.

SEAN: We do want to make [Canteen] browseable – there’s a lot of visuals, and we try to keep the articles fairly short, so maybe we’ll catch this trend, though maybe we’re running the risk of missing some profound new writer who writes in a thorny, recondite, difficult way. But you can’t have everything, right? 

SEAN: But the choice to make it more selective, smaller, to give people the best of what we’ve got – those were conscious choices. We want to highlight each piece as a special piece we’ve chosen for you, that’s part of this bigger literary work. Another thing for us is encouraging people to write outside of their genre. We think it’s really interesting when that happens.

MIA: That’s the other great thing about doing a publication this small and this personal. We figured that if what we were introducing was broad enough, we could say or decide how anything we thought was interesting could fit under that umbrella.  

SEAN: Like poetry – it’s still a rock-star idea, but it’s an uptight librarian reality. It’s painful to go to poetry readings. Its like you can hear a pin drop; it’s like church. One way to try and make poetry interesting, to get back its rock ’n’ roll spirit, is that I’m going to write an article about fights in the San Francisco poetry scene.

You mean feuds?

SEAN: Physical, bloody fights! There was a huge brawl at a reading series out in the Avenues, a place where these people also had their own home yoga studio – a very peaceful, dull place – there was a knock-down, drag-out brawl. People just punched each other in the face. And then I was involved in a poetry fight –

Over what? Line breaks?

SEAN: Over enjambment! (Laughs) This guy sucker-punched me in my own house! Luckily, I have a picture of it. So you’ll see lots of creative articles from Canteen. 

Fill in the blank: Readers everywhere should rush out and get a copy of Canteen because _____?

MIA: Take it, sound bite man. And don’t just say it’s amoral! 

(Contemplative silence)

MIA: Should I try it? Because what we’re doing is at the intersection of a variety of literary genres, which we think will appeal to a wider base than ordinary literary magazines. It’s full of content that you want to read, and it’s a beautiful object. I love the way it smells – it smells fantastic. It’s got that printed new paper, with the matte feel and smell to it. So it’s something you want to hold and touch and read and learn from and give your work to. 

SEAN: Because you’re going to learn about the beauty and madness of art, and you can keep it on your coffee table for anyone to see.

MIA: And smell. 

What type of writers or pieces are you looking to include in future issues of Canteen?

SEAN: Smart, but not boring.

You have a lot of big-name writers in there. Is that all you’re looking for?

MIA: Not at all. We do want those folks in there, but we also want new writers.

SEAN: We’re looking for work that relates to the creative process specifically, but we’re also looking for poetry, short stories, and other written formats which will impress us. We don’t know what will spark our interest – so send us your best stuff. Send us what you love.

You can read Sean’s LitMinds profile here and Mia’s LitMinds profile here. For more information on Canteen magazine and its submission requirements, click here. To purchase or subscribe to Canteen magazine, click here.

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