Yann Martel published a new book this past week titled Beatrice and Virgil.  Mr. Martel is best known for his Man Booker Prize-winning novel Life of Pi.  After the phenomenal success of Life of Pi, expectations were high for this new book.  However in the past few days, The New York Times book reviewer Michiko Kakutani and several other critics have issued harsh verdicts about Beatrice and Virgil. 

The Booksmith also received advance copies and we’ve judged this latest offering for ourselves.  Our view is that Beatrice and Virgil is a beautifully written, unconventional and intriguing book that should be read and discussed broadly.  It would be a real shame for readers to summarily dismiss this book because it disappointed a few critics.  Inspired by Mr. Martel’s work, we have written a fictionalized dialog between a bookseller who has recently read Beatrice and Virgil, and a customer who is holding a copy of this book in her hand trying to decide if she should buy it.  The scene takes place at the Booksmith, an independent bookstore in San Francisco and is reminiscent of the scores of similar conversations we (and other independent booksellers) have with our customers every day about books.  We hope this will enable readers to assess for themselves if they should read this book.

CUSTOMER:  So, what is this book about?

BOOKSELLER:  It’s hard to describe because it touches on a lot of topics many of which are hard to describe.  It seems that the author is trying to describe the indescribable.

CUSTOMER:  Hmm.. What’s the indescribable the book is trying to describe?

BOOKSELLER:  It tries to cover a lot of topics - the Holocaust, human violence, disappearance of two-thirds of animals from the planet, taxidermy, a pear…

CUSTOMER:  A pear?  What’s so indescribable about a pear?

BOOKSELLER:  Well, how would you describe a pear to someone who has never seen or tasted one? 

CUSTOMER:  Hmm… I don’t know.

BOOKSELLER:  He has a beautiful seven page long description of a pear.  It’s worth reading all by itself.  It’s like an essay inside a work of fiction.

CUSTOMER:  Well, it’s fiction, so what’s the overall story about?

BOOKSELLER:  It’s not about one thing, its complex, multi-layered and there are several stories going on simultaneously.

CUSTOMER:  I love complex, multi-layered stories.  So, who are the main characters?

BOOKSELLER:  There are four main characters – Henry, the writer; Henry, the taxidermist, Beatrice, a donkey, and Virgil, a monkey. 

CUSTOMER:  It seems that Martel loves to use animal characters.  Why do you suppose he likes to use animal characters?

BOOKSELLER:  Actually he talks about that in the book too.  Let me read you this little part - it’s really interesting - “The use of animals in his novel, he explained, was for reasons of craft rather than of sentiment...  We are cynical about our own species, but less so about animals, especially wild ones…if I tell a story about a dentist from Bavaria or Saskatchewan, I have to deal with readers’ notions about dentists from Bavaria or Saskatchewan, those preconceptions and stereotypes that lock people and stories into small boxes.  But if it’s a rhinoceros from Bavaria or Saskatchewan who is the dentist, then it’s an entirely different matter.  The reader pays closer attention, because he or she has no preconceptions about rhinoceros dentists – from Bavaria or anywhere else.  The reader’s disbelief begins to lift… Now the story can unfold more easily.  There’s nothing like the unimaginable to make people believe.”

CUSTOMER:  Why do critics hate this book?  I saw The New York Times had a really negative review, and the (SF) Chronicle’s reviewer said don’t bother reading it.

BOOKSELLER:  I am glad you bring that up.  I think The New York Times just flat out got it wrong on this one, as did some of the other critics.  And it’s not the first time they have been wrong on an important book.  I think part of the issue is that most newspaper critics try to judge books according to their own personal taste.  So, when Michiko Kakutani says she found this book to be “offensive” and “perverse” she is saying something about her own personal taste.  I didn’t find the book to be least bit offensive or perverse.  In fact, I would summarize my emotional reaction to the book as “very intriguing.”

The other problem with critics is that they often approach books with a set of expectations about what the book or any good book is supposed to be and they are not very good at articulating what those expectations are.  So, when a critic is negative about a particular title, it can likely be a result of a mismatch in their expectations.  Not every book is going to be appreciated by everyone.  Sure, as a society we consider some books to be universally good and others to be universally bad.  But those group tastes are always evolving.  And a book like Beatrice and Virgil is pushing the boundaries of that zeitgeist because with this book Martel is trying to break new ground in so many ways.  He is breaking new ground in literary form because he is blurring the line between fiction and non-fiction – the book is fiction overall but parts of it feel autobiographical, other parts read like a non-fiction essay, and then there is a play that is being written inside the plot.  And he is breaking new ground because he talks about the Holocaust in a new and different way.

Frankly, that last bit will probably get him in more trouble than anything else.  People tend to be very rigid about how they talk about the Holocaust and any attempt to diverge from what’s politically correct can attract accusations of “trivializing the Holocaust” and perhaps even anti-semitism.  I wouldn’t be surprised if someone actually tries to ban the book - kind of like what they did with Rushdie’s Satanic Verses.  Of course, that would be great for book sales (smiles).  Lastly, and this one is speculation on my part, but many of the book critics are writers themselves and there might be a bit of professional jealousy at work.  Not many writers enjoy the kind of success and fame Martel did with Life of Pi, and there would be a kind of perverse pleasure in knocking him down.

CUSTOMER:  How do you review books at the Booksmith?  Do you have a different approach than the critics?

BOOKSELLER:  As a bookseller, we approach book reviews very differently because for us it’s more an exercise in matchmaking and helping each reader figure out what books she wants to read, what books she is going to enjoy, and what books are going to push her thinking and challenge her.  So, generally it’s a very personalized recommendation.   And when we read books and buy new titles for the store, we are always trying to inform ourselves so we know who to recommend each book to.

CUSTOMER:  Well, DID you like the book?

BOOKSELLER:  Very much! I loved it actually.  I might read it again and I hardly ever read books a second time.  But my colleague here didn’t love it as much.  Like most books, this is not a book that everyone is going to love.

CUSTOMER:  What did you like about it?

BOOKSELLER:  It made me think, and I like books that make me think.  It’s insightful – the essay about the different roles of fiction and non-fiction and the importance of the narrative form – lays out the framework for an important conversation that’s overdue – especially for all of us involved with literature.  The description of taxidermy impacted me so much that I don’t think I will ever look at a stuffed animal head the same way again.  The book also had some great one-liners that I really enjoyed like “Colonialism is a terrible bane for a people upon whom it is imposed, but a blessing for a language.”  I think the book is beautifully written with intricate descriptions and observations, but it’s not verbose.  I don’t like books where the language takes precedence over substance.  This is a very accessible book – it’s easy to read.   And, what I enjoyed the most was exactly what some critics are complaining about – the fact that the writer is trying to break new ground in so many ways – and I tend to give a lot of latitude to someone who tries something as hard and complex as this book.

CUSTOMER:  So, who would like this book?

BOOKSELLER:  I think lots of people are going to like this book - including people who like complex multi-layered stories that are lucidly written, people who are still trying to understand the Holocaust and are open to new literary treatments of the subject, and people who are open to new literary forms and like to judge things for themselves instead of taking The New York Times’ word as the definitive review.   As of this morning, more than two-thirds of the reviews on Amazon were 4 & 5 star reviews.  That’s a pretty good, though unscientific, indicator that the newspaper critics are out of touch with readers.  One other thing, Beatrice and Virgil is very different than the other book Yann Martel is famous for – Life of Pi.  It’s important that people not approach it with the expectation of reading another Life of Pi.

CUSTOMER:  Should I read it?

BOOKSELLER:  I think it’s an important book and it’s a relatively quick read, so if you want to judge it for yourself, you should definitely read it.   You will be better informed about why the critics are getting so emotionally worked up and you can add your own voice to the discussion.  But not every book is for everyone, and if you are not intrigued by what I told you so far, we can always recommend something else you might enjoy.

***

Writer’s note: The Booksmith is pleased to host Yann Martel in conversation with local San Francisco writer Laura Fraser on Wednesday April 21st.  If you can’t join us, but have a burning question for Yann Martel, please email us at events (at) Booksmith (dot) com

Best quote heard
“If one bookseller is excited about a book we sell 10 copies, if two booksellers get excited about the same book we sell 100 copies.” - Dan Chartrand of Water Street Bookstore, Exeter, New Hampshire

Bookseller with the most personal impact
Roxanne Coady from RJ Julia, Madison, Connecticut because she is super smart, fearless and outspoken.  And she gave me my new mantra – “Progress, not perfection.”

Favorite new bookstore discovered
King’s English Bookshop in Salt Lake City because you can tell that people working there really love books, plus they really know how to merchandise

Stirring speech brought us to tears (almost)
Terry Tempest Williams, author of Finding Beauty in a Broken World, talking about what independent bookstores mean to her.  Watch me conduct a brief impromptu interview with her and Rick Simonson of Elliott Bay Book Company, Seattle, Washington.  Here is part II of the interview.

Best beer I bought
Stacy Mitchell, senior researcher at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance and author of Big Box Swindle, because she really helped me grok why buy local makes sense

Tamim will be appearing at several locations around San Francisco for readings and discussions about the book.  For more information about local appearances check out the library website.  You can also join an online discussion about the book and this interview at the main LitMinds site.

About the Book

LitMinds:  Can you tell us how this book came about?

Tamim:  A couple of years before 9/11, I had this idea for a book that would be about road trips I had taken.  I thought I’ll write about three road trips and then put all of them together… I’d call it “The Journey of a Life.”  So I selected my road trips and I started to write. 

Then at a point, it struck me that I hadn’t chosen the journey that brought me from Afghanistan to the United States and in fact all three of those trips I was talking about had happened since I came to America.  I discovered I couldn’t remember anything about the journey coming here. 

That got me thinking about the before and the after in terms of my own life.  I started to realize that in a sense I was living as the person I became after I came to the United States and that there was another guy in there too.   And then for the next year, whenever I could take some time off from paying work, I started to just sit down and recollect anything I could about my life before I left.  I wrote a thousand pages and I thought it was for a book I would write at some point later in my life. 

LitMinds:  How do you do that?  If you’ve forgotten experiences from forty years ago, how do you rediscover them?

Tamim:  The process of memory is a process of letting go because memory works by association.  So when you get a hold of something it leads you to one thing and that leads you to another thing.  The trick is to not impose the writer’s mind on the structure of your memories.  I’ll give you an example:  I remember when I went back to Afghanistan or tried to go back to Afghanistan, in 1979 – I was in Paris and I met this Afghan guy there and I guess I had an idea of what that interaction was – and I was trying to write that and no memories were coming.  And then I remembered that he told me a lot of things about my family like “I know your this relative and I know your that relative” and I remember feeling very pumped up about it because his comments made me feel that I had a very well known family.  But it was only at that moment –many years later – as I revisited that memory and that occurred to me that the conversation was an etiquette interaction and I was supposed to respond with “Oh, your family – I know your this relative, I know your that relative…”  But I didn’t do that and instead I just focused on how great I was.  And when I remembered that experience, all of a sudden I could remember all kinds of other things that led away from that moment.  So, it’s a question of trying to get to your authentic experience and one of things that allows you to do it is to not impose on your journey of memory a sense of where you’re going with it.

So, my process was that I wasn’t going to think about what I was writing.  I didn’t start out by writing something instead I was just remembering something.  I had over a thousand pages and it was a thousand pages that I hadn’t looked at because I never read over what I had written in the course of a day.  And then after 9/11 my agent said “You should write something.  Don’t you have something to write about Afghanistan?”  And I thought maybe the time is now.  Because at that moment in the wake of 9/11 I was imbued with the sense that there are these two groups of people.  They are on different sides of a wall and each one only sees themselves and their concerns and no one sees both sides.  I was peculiarly situated.  What had most of my life been a curse – this bicultural thing – at that moment it felt like something that I actually needed to apply to the situation – try to tell what I knew.   And that’s why I wrote this book.

The Bicultural Curse and Being Normal

LitMinds: Why do you call it a curse?

Tamim:  Well, because when you are bicultural in the way that I am and that many young Afghans are experiencing here in America  – the curse was that I never felt normal.  The curse was that I felt out of place no matter where I was – I was always the guy who wasn’t one of us. 

LitMinds: Can you define what being normal is?

Tamim:  Normal is – you don’t feel out of place – that’s what it is. And of course, there is a level (of being normal) which is in yourself – accepting –I’ve finally come to  understand all the ways in which I don’t fit and that is, in fact, who I am (laughs).   Add up all the ways in which I don’t fit and you have Tamim. 

LitMinds: Give us an example…what are the ways in which you don’t fit?

Tamim:  No, I think that’s not the way to go – I think the way to go at it is to say that often my experience growing up was that when I walked into a room with a bunch of people I felt like they stopped talking because they couldn’t comfortably converse with this guy around.  Now on the Afghan side, when I went to school or when I went anyplace outside my household, I felt like an outsider and that’s how people referred to me.

LitMinds:  So, you were an outsider in Afghanistan when you were growing up and then you came here and you were an outsider here?

Tamim:  Yeah. And when I came here, I was an outsider here and there was so much to know about social relationships. You know how there’s all the unwritten rules, especially when you’re an adolescent. There’s dating and people of different genders get together and they know what to do and you don’t know what to do. I understand now that everyone goes through this (laughs).  I thought it was because I was an Afghan guy. And you know in fact when I was growing up in Afghanistan, the rules about interaction with the opposite sex as a teenager was – they were so intense that one was very aware of what one must not or could not do outside with anyone who wasn’t your family.  You couldn’t make improper advances which could include even just looking at some woman…or some girl.

LitMinds:  So, the cultural rules are really different?

Tamim:  They are different.  Just to toss something out there – an aspect of marriage is that in Afghanistan, it wasn’t at all uncommon for old guys to marry young women.  And one of the reasons is if you’re going to marry you’re going to have to be well situated and you don’t usually get there until you’ve been around for awhile.  You know what the flip side is? The flip side of that is that my sister, when she came here, if she was asked for a date by someone who was her age, she felt humiliated.  She felt that the only way her status was nourished was being with older guys that were at least fifteen years older and she did in fact marry a guy who was fifteen or twenty years older than her.

LitMinds:  Let’s go back to the bit about being bicultural.  America is a country of immigrants so at some level, isn’t being bicultural the same as being normal?  Because everybody has somewhere in their past, another culture, another society, another set of rules…for some people it’s more and for some people it’s less but as a country of immigrants is there anything that is normal that is not bicultural?

Tamim:  Well…yes normal is bicultural here or multicultural, but in fact America has a culture.  That culture absorbs into itself some kind of sense of the normalcy of biculturalism and multiculturalism and that’s what American culture consists of but most other cultures are not that way – other cultures are mono-cultural so for someone to grow up that way and be in this soup of biculturalism that’s the opposition – those are the two different things. 

In Afghanistan when I was there – there was no other person who was from the west.  I was the only one. So my first experience of biculturalism wasn’t being in America and feeling like I had another culture.  It was being in Afghanistan and feeling like I had another culture.  Now these guys who are here – these Afghan-American guys who are here – you know I think every [person who identifies with a] culture that’s still closely tied to their traditional ways back home probably goes through their version of what Afghan-Americans are going through here. And it’s certainly true that for an Afghan person – man or woman, when they walk through the doors of that house, there is a unified monoculture inside that house and it extends to a network of other houses that are all Afghan. And, there are arranged marriages and they have concerts and their parties at which only the hundred people who are in your family are there. 

When these guys go out into high school they find that there is a whole other world out there and they have to change.  For a long time I only knew the young folks of the Afghan community as hovering about when I was with their people that were my age.  So I’d talk to their mothers and fathers and they’d be there and they seemed like just nice Afghan kids.  They were very respectful to elders, they came and served the candy and the tea, you know they didn’t intrude – they did all the things you’re supposed to do.  It didn’t occur to me until later that one of my older teenage cousin’s children was bald and he had a gold earring in his ear.  And it didn’t occur to me that outside of the house he’s part of some gang and we don’t know what that life is and his parents don’t know…and that’s just a whole other thing.

LitMinds:  This teenager was living two parallel lives?

Tamim:  Yes! What one of these guys said to me and I think this is really a true thing…  He said, “you know you go home and you pretend to be Afghan and you go out there and you pretend to be American and you say to yourself ‘where is it that I’m not pretending?’” And then you ask what is normal? That’s what normal is – where you’re not pretending.  And…that absence of normalcy is partly imposed from outside and it’s partly you but you know what you can do if you can’t get to that place where you feel like you’re not pretending?  It isn’t enough to say ‘get over it.’

LitMinds:  Tell us more about the part that is imposed from you on the outside…

Tamim:  Well, you know if you’re a Muslim in this country like an Afghan guy who’s grown up in a Muslim household and you’re inculcated with Muslim ideas and you go out there and you’re in high school and you say “well I’m a Muslim.” There’s no way to explain to someone what that is because the society at large has an idea of what a Muslim is … (laughs)

LitMinds:  So, it’s not a favorable idea?

Tamim:  It’s not a favorable idea. So, now if you’re an Afghan guy you’re feeling like you don’t have an identity and you’re looking for an authentic identity and rooted-ness, the only place to turn is your background, your family, your homeland, and Islam. So now, you’re in a position where you’re seeking your identity in a way that involves making yourself hated.  That’s difficult because then you’re in this tormented search for how to assert that ‘No, I’m a Muslim but that doesn’t make me a bad person.’

Social Contexts and Memory of Civilizations

LitMinds: What is the expectation from ‘normal’ Americans here that is not being met?

Tamim:  Partly you’re asking a question from a guy who is able to be as normal as you want – I don’t live an alienated life at all.  Nobody looks at me and says alien.  I talk like a normal guy and I look like a normal guy.  But going back to – what is your question?

LitMinds:  Let’s go back to the hypothetical example – you said this Afghan or this Muslim kid goes to school and says I’m Muslim and people start to formulate an impression of what that is and it’s not a favorable impression. It’s not anything he did…it’s just they have formed an impression based on that label because he’s a Muslim. So, the question is – what is a reasonable expectation from these people who are forming an impression?  Because it seems that they are doing something that they shouldn’t be doing. 

Tamim:  Well, now wait a minute…the people, you mean mainstream society is doing something that they shouldn’t be doing? You know social attitudes are not chosen so I don’t know if you can put that kind of judgment on a society…

LitMinds: Aren’t they?

Tamim:  No, they’re not.  If you observe something like that – what you can do is search for ways to shed more light to introduce more information in the situation.  I don’t think the proper thing to say is you guys are being bad and you should be good now – you should love Muslims – you can’t do that.  You’ve got what you’ve got in your head and the only thing that’s going to change it is getting more stuff in your head…that’s why I’m writing this book I’m writing now (more on that later).

LitMinds:  Allow us to challenge that point of view for a moment – you said social attitudes are not chosen but doesn’t each one of us as an individual make a very conscious and explicit choice of which attitudes we are going to follow? Are we going to be supportive of gay marriage or not? Are we going to be racist or not?

Tamim:  I think not.  Actually, I think it’s self congratulating of people who aren’t racist to say to people who are racist  - ‘you could be like me but you’re not, you’re a lower species of human being, I’m enlightened, you’re not.’  It might be correct but what does that imply?  There’s probably more racism in rural Alabama that in suburban San Francisco and I don’t think you can say that well, those people chose to be racists and the people here chose not to – I don’t think that is the case – if it were there would be a sort of homogenous random distribution of racists and non-racists.  So obviously there are larger social forces at work here. 

LitMinds:  So, what do you think forms social attitudes if it’s not individual choices?

Tamim:  I think history and the information set that’s available to you has a lot to do with that too.  I also think your life situation has a lot to do with it.  Most people take on the coloration of those around them.  This might seem like I’m going off on a wild tangent here but indulge me for a moment…I was listening to a bunch of teenagers that I was driving around a few years ago.  One of them was my daughter. And, my daughter is a very intelligent and independent minded person but, I was overhearing everyone in the back seat talk about cultural artifacts – this actor, that movie, this piece of music.  And there was not one shred of dissent or argument there …someone would say “what about so and so…” and they would all react “oh yeah, oh I hate that person…”  Then someone else would say “what about this great piece of music…”, and everyone else would react “oh yeah, I love that!”  And it’s like – my brother compared them to minnows you know it’s like whoosh… and the little flock goes someplace.  So, that’s something that’s in the human community.

LitMinds: Is it the pressure to conform?

Tamim:  We have it in us to try to be part of whatever group.  We don’t want to be out and isolated on our own.  When you’re looking at how to tackle something like racism or ignorant prejudice about gay marriage, I just feel like the information and …working to change concrete material conditions– these are the things that are going to change attitudes.  Not so much becoming a block of your own attitude, [but] judgmentally attacking another block of attitudes.

LitMinds: That’s a good point.  These social attitudes relate to another very interesting concept you raise in the book, you called it “social memory” of the Islamic world.  Let’s explore that a bit more – what is social memory of a billion people?

Tamim:  I think that we all live in a narrative and not simply in a physical reality. We live in a narrative in our own live, of a group, of our sense of where the world is going…and I think that people who interact more with one another than they do with outsiders, begin to build a common narrative.  I would assert that different people can be situated at different places with respect to a common shared narrative.  Some people can say they’re the master race “yes this is true and we’re the master race.” And somebody else can say “yes this narrative is true and you guys are the oppressors and we’re the victims.”  But they’re all talking about this one big narrative. And, I think there is one narrative that is commonly perceived in the Western world – or that people in most western societies have some consciousness of that.  And, I think there’s another one in the Eastern world that I think pertains to Islam.  What I would say about the social memory of those billion people – is that there are mythological elements and there is some arc of what the great events of history were and some sense of the drive that informs the forward progress of civilization that people have a common sense of.  Whether they are in Indonesia or Nigeria – if they are Muslim – because they continually brush up against the same stories. Stories that are not even known here for the most part.  That’s kind of what I mean by social memory and I think there is a level at which we’re operating now as if we have a conflict between the  Muslim world and the western world.  Whereas it seems to me the more accurate description is we are in the same space having conflict internally and we don’t realize we are not talking about the same stuff. 

LitMinds:  It seem like you are saying that there are two sets of social memories – western set of social memories and an Islamic set of social memories and they are different.  They might have the same events,  but the events are interpreted differently because of different social contexts.

Tamim:  Yes, they are interpreted differently and in certain areas they overlap so that we’ve been a part of the same event we’ve been in.  The Crusades for example are a part of what happened in the middle east – which in other places is considered the middle west.  Where you are standing shapes how you might be talking about the same situation.

LitMinds:  Given how these stories can be so different in different cultures and on different sides and over time the stories get more entrenched into a kind of self-reinforcing mechanism – how do we get beyond that?  How do we get to a shared understanding between the Israelis and the Palestinians? Or the West and Islam? Which is more about what you said – it’s about conflicts which are in us, not within civilization…Or do we even get there?

Tamim:  Well…I’m busy writing a narrative through Islamic eyes and I’m putting that out there just so people can see how it would be to have come to this place from a whole different narrative.  I haven’t quite finished it and what I want to try to say in my last chapter is – I’m not saying this is the real history of the world either - this is another parochial history. There’s a lot of these parochial histories.  What we have to do now, my point of departure is [reflect on] our sense of the history of the world. How we got here now.  So our parochial history which is here now is modern industrial society with the U.S. leading the way. And ideally someday the whole world will be democratic and middle class.

LitMinds:   And Capitalistic?

Tamim:  Yes, Capitalistic!  And technologically advanced, that’s the ideal.  And we’re going there…people who aren’t going there, are called underdeveloped.  And Islam has a whole other narrative which has been submerged but it has been there for 1,400 years.  And what I’m saying is neither of those is really the history of the world. Where we are right now is we’re on the edge of a global civilization which has been constructed out of a number of big rivers which have come together.  There’s the Chinese which is this sort of impulse, there’s the Islamic impulse, there’s this western impulse – there’s all these things which are now getting intermixed.

Socio-Politics of the War in Afghanistan

LitMinds:  There’s something I want to explore – and this starts to get into some of the politics.  You said, “Here in Iraq as in the world as a whole, what we’re fighting is not an entity but a condition.”

Tamim:  I said that?

LitMinds:  Yes, it’s an article you wrote on your website.  What condition are we fighting with the War on Terror?

Tamim:  First of all let’s talk about entity because entity is what frames our discussion.  We talked about this entity called Al-Qaeda. And the way we talk about it is – ‘if we can get the officers and the government of Al-Qaeda and find their capital… we will have solved something.’ 

We talk that same way about the Taliban Things keep happening in Afghanistan – the news reports say it was Taliban remnants for years and years now.  How many remnants are there in this thing and who is the Taliban? 

When you use that phrase, it makes it seem like it’s an entity like a country or like an organization like UNESCO or like a corporation or they’ve got a structure and a chain of command.  There’s no such thing!

You get rid of some bunch of Taliban and five or six guys in the next village, who know all about what Talibanism is all about, get together and say – ‘let’s go do something.’ And there you have another Taliban remnant who weren’t Taliban yesterday.  When I say it’s a condition we’re fighting – the thing that I’m most aware of – that what best describes the condition is the absence of stable social networks.  It’s societies that have been atomized to the level that individuals or small groups can make decisions about what they’re going to do and they don’t have to ask anybody about it. 

What informs their decisions about what they’re going to do? Well, there’s the ideology that’s in the air, that’s all there is.  I think back to Afghanistan and people say there was always a lot of impulse to violence in the Afghan personality.  So, why wasn’t there a lot of actual violence? 

Those Afghans are full of macho – I’m gonna prove myself important man who will kick your ass – and there’s a lot of that around.  Why wasn’t everybody always kicking everybody’s ass?  That’s because you don’t want to shame your family – you don’t want to have to explain what you’re doing to your aunts.  You’re part of so many networks that you have obligations to – and that’s what counterbalances this other thing around the different impulses to violence. 

When you take a society and dice it and slice it and destroy the social networks, there are people who don’t have social responsibility to anyone and nobody before whom they feel shamed.  So now, anything can happen. 

In Afghanistan that certainly happened – it was a long process but it started out when the communists invaded and they bombed the countryside and villages were disrupted and the women and children went out to fight.  And, there was all this social structure that existed before and now it doesn’t exist at all. 

The whole family was completely atomized and distributed across the landscape.  If you go to the refugee camps you see hordes and hordes of children - they’re all boys, and they’re just roaming the streets.  What social obligations, values or anything like that are going to restrain those boys?  It’s only what the other boys tell them, and there’s no other thing. 

So, I see a lot of the horror of the violence that’s come out as being symptoms of this atomization of social structures.  The worst of this stuff has come out of failed states and in those places it has been distributed down throughout the society.  Lebanon is an example of such a state that was destroyed long ago and all the different factions fought each other and the society has been atomized.

LitMinds:  So, can you summarize what condition are we fighting?

Tamim:  I’m saying if it’s a condition that’s producing the violence but your framework is that there is an enemy and an entity here whom you must fight, then your fighting is aimed at destroying the ability of the enemy to organize – that’s what you do in a war.  If France fights Germany, what they try to do is get to the capital and destroy their ability to communicate, disrupt their networks and organization, make them disorganized, then you’ve got them.  So now, if you’re fighting a war where you’re framework tells you that what you must do to win is destroy the ability of the enemy to organize but what’s actually producing the violence is this disorganization of their social networks!  So, what you’re doing is contributing to the thing that you don’t like.

LitMinds:  So, you are saying that we’re focused on the wrong problem.  Our energy should be focused on helping create stability and organization in these societies, and instead we are making them more disorganized.

Tamim:  That’s right!

LitMinds:  Let’s talk about Afghanistan and the US decision to go into Afghanistan in 2001.  We read your letter, the famous day-after-9/11 letter, and in that you were questioning the value of going to war in Afghanistan – you were saying things like “to get to Afghanistan we’d have to go through Pakistan and who has the stomach for that” and “if Bin Laden can polarize the world into Islam and West, he’s got a billion soldiers.”  So, it seems you were basically against US going into Afghanistan.  Yet six years later, you have an article on your website in which you are basically saying, “we left too soon.” It’s like leaving after the coin toss in the football game.  So those two positions seem to be contradictory.  Should we have not gone in or did we leave too soon?

Tamim:  You ask tough questions!  It’s a very complicated question – we left too soon because we didn’t stay for anything that resembled reconstruction.  The military action in Afghanistan right in the beginning, I think was – maybe I’m going to change my mind while I speak here – I think it was okay.  What they did right at the beginning and I’ll break down what we actually did right at the beginning because that has been obscured somewhat. 

For about a week or something, America went in and bombed all these targets.  Bad idea! That was the thing I was saying was a bad idea – bad idea. 

Then, they stopped doing that and they began to give support to the northern alliance and the northern alliance is what actually took Kabul and they did something else; they went to Pakistan and the put the kind of pressure they were able to put because they controlled the purse strings for ISI and said you guys have to stop supporting the Taliban.  The moment ISI pulled back on that, the Taliban knew they were done.  So, that was a pretty nuanced kind of response and it wasn’t the thing that I was warning against which was a hundred thousand troops pouring across the border through Pakistan.  They did do that though – they just didn’t do it in Afghanistan – they did it in Iraq.  And wasn’t I right? look what happened in Iraq? 

LitMinds:  Let’s go back to Afghanistan, and tell us why you think we left too soon?

Tamim:  Yeah okay but no I want to make that point – that’s the thing that they did in Iraq and look how that turned out?  Now let’s get back to Afghanistan…when I went back in 2002, people were ready to get going.  They thought the war was over and judiciously applied reconstruction aid would have created a renaissance there.  So many people were ready to get involved and had creative ideas about rebuilding and they knew what they needed and wanted.  When I went into the villages, people would take me someplace and say this is the piece of land we used to grow this and that on, now we need one of those deep wells here and we could grow this and this and this but we need a little money, do you have a little money? 

I had to say “No, I don’t have any money.”  There was that other guy - I talked about him.  He had a plan to start a perfume factory or a cosmetics factory because he knew that there was going to be a market for that. Which there was – this beauty school idea has taken off.  There were all these people but what actually happened was – the only reconstruction aid that came in basically was big ticket reconstruction for like the roads – which didn’t happen until there was a moment where they needed some progress to report to the Congress and then they quickly built the roads and they falling apart already.  The reconstruction aid goes to Afghanistan, I heard from Ambassador Jawad, the Afghanistan Ambasador, it’s the rule of that reconstruction aid - that three quarters of that dollars be spent in America. 

LitMinds:  Really!

Tamim:  Yes.  Who goes over there – it’s the foreign contractors and the engineers who go over there, and they make something like $200,000 a year and all of them have private body guards which I don’t blame them – who would go there without high priced body guards?  Those guys make an enormous amount of money and the Afghans who do the work – they make five to ten dollars a week.  Then there’s all this stuff happening with setting up private corporations in Afghanistan; they’ve got a private university, a mall, many restaurants; the Chinese have come in and put in all these whorehouses – that’s reconstruction I guess, I don’t know…and meanwhile people are earning, police officers are earning like 50 bucks a month and postal workers 30 bucks a month and even the members of parliament are paid nothing. 

If you have a house, you try to find a foreign guy that will rent your house and then you’d charge what the market could possibly bear – which is a lot – because they’ve got plenty of money.  That drags up the prices of everything else so no one can afford to live in Kabul.  The only way you can possibly afford it is to engage in some sort of illegal activity like drugs and/or take bribes - probably both.  So now, nothing gets done unless you have money to pay for all your permits and stuff like that.  Kabul and the reconstruction program overall has become non-functional. 

Have you read this thing?  (Tamim excitedly waives a well worn library copy of Naomi Klein’s book  - “The Shock Doctrine”)  The Shock Doctrine is totally happening in Afghanistan – it’s happening everywhere but it’s happening a lot in Afghanistan – disaster capitalism, you know.  A country has been destroyed and what has happened is an opportunity for people to make money out of the destruction there and that money in Afghanistan mainly consists of taxing Americans and laundering the money into the private corporations that are allegedly rebuilding Afghanistan. And it all gets banked right here.  So, that’s why I say that we left too soon.  The situation there is getting worse and worse.

LitMinds:  But the public seems to think that this is the war that has gone better.  It seems that you are saying we botched the reconstruction effort?  And continue to botch it?

Tamim:  Well, I don’t know if you can say botch because I don’t know if there was a serious attempt at reconstruction.

LitMinds:  But there has been a lot of money going in there…and the taxpayers have been funding it with the expectation that some good was going to come out of it.  We think that’s the expectation the people at large have – the taxpayers, the voters, all of us common people.

Tamim:  Right!  But when you said botched, it’s language that seems to imply we tried but we made mistakes – I don’t know if they’re mistakes.  People deliberately constructed an avenue to make money and there was no mistake there.  And the taxpayers have no control over what happens with the tax money.  That happens in the government.  And the government increasingly is a contracting agency for private companies.  I tell you everybody has got to read this book (Shock Doctrine).  I have noticed a lot of things over the years that puzzled me because you try to analyze a situation that looks like it’s being botched and you can’t imagine how they could make such stupid mistakes but I read this book and I see that oh, there’s no botching going on here, this is all deliberate – that was the plan!  I don’t know who’s complicit in that than the government.  You know, the soldiers are not complicit, these troops that go over there - they learn what their job is and they are told to do this thing and they’re in a dangerous situation and they’re trying to do the best they can.  The troops have nothing to do with it and even the commanders have nothing to do with it.  It’s all on the political side.

Writing Career and Focus on Helping Other Writers

LitMinds:  Let’s talk a bit about your writing career – tell us abut the writer’s workshop that you’ve been involved with.

Tamim:  That workshop has been operating since about 1946.  It’s a peculiar institution because it’s never had a structure or an organization or anything.  It’s just people come and somebody leads it and it meets every Tuesday from seven to nine.  That’s been the regular thing from 1946. 

So I joined maybe fifteen years ago and the guy, who was running it, died and someone else ran it for a year and when he left people said why don’t you run it and so I started running it.  Which basically means, showing up every Tuesday with the key.  But it’s gained a certain solidity since I’ve been running it, it’s changed over the years as to what it is.  And at one point, it was in the library and anyone who walked by could just sort of come in and now it meets in an art gallery and I feel like it’s self selecting. 

The writers who come there already think of themselves as writers and so that’s a self selecting process.  And since the quality of writing is pretty good, people come feeling like they belong in this company  and those who don’t feel they belong don’t come back.  And all we do is we get together and people read their work aloud, and they get feedback from whoever’s there, and we go on to the next guy. 

LitMinds:  So it’s just a way to share your work and get immediate feedback from other writers?

Tamim:  Yes.  And it’s had little offshoot groups where people get together and say, why don’t we start Wednesday night group and we can deal with stuff at greater length or people who were writing science fiction, got together separately.  Those little groups form and dissolve because they meet in somebody’s house and their life, for some reason, is limited. 

And this group, it’s always met in a public place, it’s never been in a private home and we have three simple rules – 1) You can’t read more than six pages, 2) When the feedback starts you can’t talk, and 3) You can’t bring back something that you’ve brought once, it has to be something different, you can’t edit it and bring it back. 

LitMinds:  That’s the three rules.  Anybody can come in?

Tamim:  Anybody can come.

LitMinds:  We are surprised there isn't a long line around the block – of all the new and emerging writers waiting to get in and get some quality feedback.

Tamim:  Well,  once in a while it swells and it gets to be like twenty people are coming and people have to wait weeks and weeks to read and so then it collapses and gets back down to eight or nine.  Often people come, they attend every week for a about a year or two and then they drift off and come back every once in a while.  There is an ever growing sort of penumbra of writers around the workshop.  In recent years a lot of people have been publishing.  Originally, that wasn’t a very prominent aspect of the workshop. 

LitMinds:  Let’s talk more about your next book.   Do you think that you’re particularly well suited to bring the Islamic version of world history to the West?

Tamim:  No, I’m not the best suited but I’m the only one who is doing it.  Many people have said “Excuse me, I don’t mean to offend you but why you?” (laughs) And, I think it partly comes from the same place that West of Kabul came from…you know I grew up in the Muslim world – my first exposure to history was that world history – I have a sort of deep memory of some other sense of world history that’s out there.  And,  I’ve been involved as a person who’s spent many years in educational publishing.  With the prevailing doctrine of world history being taught in America.  So that’s my point of departure and it says “wait a minute, there is this other way to look at everything…” 

So, I’m just getting it from other people’s work.  What I’m saying in this book is not at all difficult or controversial for anyone to know.  Lot’s of people have written little bits and pieces of this and I’m not trying to assert something that most scholars would disagree with – it’s just that I’m putting it all together. 

LitMinds:  What part of the writing/ publishing process are you in and when can we expect to see the finished book?

Tamim:  Well, I’ve just finished the first draft.  I probably should deliver it to my editor pretty soon.  It’s scheduled to come out in spring of ’09 and I hope it does because I always like to get them out there fast once they are written.  I don’t have a title yet.  My title is “World History Through Islamic Eyes.”  And my editor said, “No, that’s the subtitle, what’s the title?”  I’ve played with “Crescent Moon.”  I’ve called it “The Medina Project.”  “Interrupted Journey” was there for awhile but I think that’s passed away.  I was playing with “From India to Istanbul” to give it a thematic connection to my other book.

LitMinds:  Last question about the title of “West of Kabul, East of New York.”  What is west of Kabul, east of New York?

Tamim:  Well I wanted to first evoke the idea that you’re between these two places; you’re too east for New York and you’re too west for Kabul.  So you’re not really in either place.  And then I also liked the title because there’s a fairy tale called “East of the Sun, West of the Moon?”  And I just thought it gave a certain mythological flavor to it. 

LitMinds:  Thank you for your time and for speaking with us.  We look forward to seeing you at the San Francisco events for the One City One Book program.

Beyond the usual fare of Pulitzer-Award winners and New Short Story collections, there have been some real gems including: Odd-ball Histories, Tribute to Bruno Shultz, Proust is not dead! and Myths Re-Invented.

The latest display was created by our 24-year old staffer, Martha Pettit, and I just had to blog about it: "My Awesome Literary Mix CD" has got to be one of the coolest things I've ever seen.

I'll date myself here by saying that my experience in high school was creating mix cassette tapes for my friends to play on their walkmans, and of course with the advances in technology the formats have changed to CDs and MP3 players but the concept is the same.

Like Rob Sheffield's recent memoir "Love Is A Mix Tape" helps us re-discover -- it's a time-consuming but fully rewarding activity to create a unique compilation.  I still listen to old mix tapes given to me on birthdays and by old boyfriends when nostalgia strikes.   

Book people will certainly appreciate this latest playlist Martha compiled for us to enjoy; "I was inspired by the song Wuthering Heights by Kate Bush; Todd (also a Booksmith staffer) and I were discussing what a great song it is and I relayed the story of a friend who also loved the song but had no clue that it was a reference to Emile Bronte's novel" says Martha. 

How hard was it to assemble?  "Between my boyfriend and me, we came up with about 2/3 of the songs.  The rest I did a little internet research, googling songs with literary references. And, most of the books I've read too -- I'd say 90% of them."

Beside Kate Bush's song, I really enjoyed the memories conjured from the Smiths' "Girlfriend in a Coma" -- says Martha "I could have picked just about any Douglas Coupland book since his books have a ton of song references."

Here is the full playlist for your listening and reading pleasure:

MY AWESOME LITERARY MIX CD

by Martha Pettit, The Booksmith

1.”Killing an Arab” –The Cure (The Stranger by Albert Camus)

2. “Tear in Your Hand”-Tori Amos (Sandman series by Neil Gaiman)

3.”Wuthering Heights”-Kate Bush (Wuthering Heights by Emile Bronte)

4.“Ghost of Tom Joad”-Bruce Springsteen  (Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck)

5.”Paranoid Android”-Radiohead (Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams)

6.”Mr.Tambourine Man”-Bob Dylan (Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson)*

7.”Satellite of Love”-Lou Reed   (Ghostwritten by David Mitchell)*

8.”The River”-P.J. Harvey  (The River by Flannery O’Connor)

9.”Myla Goldberg”-The Decemberists  (Bee Season by Myla Goldberg)

10.”Ground Beneath Her Feet”-U2 (Ground Beneath Her Feet by Salman Rushdie)

11.”Norwegian Wood”-The Beatles (Norwegian Wood by Hakuri Murakami)*

12.”Disorder”-Joy Division (Crash by J.G. Ballard)

13.”Girlfriend in a Coma”-The Smiths (Girlfriend in a Coma by Douglas Coupland)*

14.”La Pastie de la Bourgeoisie”-Belle & Sebastian   (Catcher in the Rye by J.G. Salinger)

15.”Holland 1945”-Neutral Milk Hotel   (Diary of Anne Frank by Anne Frank)

16.”Alice”-Tom Waits (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll)

17.”Little Green”-Joni Mitchell (Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? by Lorrie Moore)*

18.”My Vien Ilin”-Ted Leo &  the Pharmacists   (The Odyssey by Homer)

Praveen and I have just returned from an 8-day visit to jolly ol’ England – there to visit local literary landmarks, and represent The Booksmith as part of the American delegation of booksellers at the London Book Fair. 

I’m responsible for the summary commentary; Praveen will post his great photos and bookseller interviews.   Here are my observations and key take-aways from our trip:

•  London’s venerable ol’ bookstores – Daunt’s, Foyles and Stanfords – are wonderful places to visit and lose yourself for hours at a time.

•  The London Book Fair is an interesting counterpart to America’s Book Expo America.  In the most critical view, booksellers are little more than an afterthought at LBF.  A historical legacy of the LBF’s origins and current industry dynamics, publisher deal-making is the focus as the majority of attendees are present to negotiate publishing & distribution rights.

•  Our American booksellers delegation was warmly welcomed by British Booksellers association, English Pen writers’ group, arts publishers Phaidon, the National Portrait Gallery, among others. 

       _____   _____  ______ ______  _____   _____  ______ ______  _____   _____  ______

Getting away and reflecting on our business with a group of fellow booksellers was by far the most valuable part of our trip.  Our entourage included many well-known and respected booksellers:

●   Chuck & Dee Robinson of Village Books in Bellingham, Washington

●   Carla Cohen of Politics & Prose in Washington D.C.

●   Barbara Morrow of Northshire Books in Manchester, Vermont

●   Catherine & Tony of Sam Weller’s in Salt Lake City, Utah

●   Roberta Rubin of The Book Stall at Chestnut Court in Illinois

●   Amy Thomas of Pegasus Books in Berkeley, California

●   Neil Van Uum of Joseph-Beth bookstores

●   Patti Pattee of Watermark Book Co. in Anacortes, Washington

●   Roni Devlin of Literary Life in Grand Rapids, Michigan

●   Melony Vance, formerly of Latitude 33 in Laguna Beach, California

●   Morley Horder of Eagle Harbor Book Co. on Bainbridge Island in Washington

●   Kerry Slattery of Skylight Books in Los Angeles, California

and of course yours truly….

●   Christin Evans and Praveen Madan of The Booksmith in San Francisco, California

We started Friday night with a dinner hosted by the organizers of the London Book Fair, Reed Exhibitions, and met a couple of British independent bookstore owners.  The weekend was filled with wonderful guided tours of the Tate Britain and Tate Modern museums, including an exhibit by rising star Peter Doig.  We also had a guided tour of the painstakingly reconstructed Globe Theater, Shakepeare’s London company’s theater. 
 

Tour of London’s Fine Independent Bookstores

A real treat for two bookstore junkies, London is host to several strong, local independent bookstores, and we had the treat to leisurely browse the shelves at Foyles, Daunts and Stanford’s.

Of the three, Daunt’s is the smallest in size (yet it still it has three floors and emphasizes a quality selection) which allows a wonderful browsing experience.   It’s in a beautiful old Edwardian building with carved oak bookshelves and green library light fixtures and during the day natural light from skylights above give this historic bookstore a magical feel as one wonders along the wall of books, uniquely organized by place.  An interesting approach to organization, world travelers can appreciate fiction, memoirs and travel guides alike are shelved together so that you might find an interesting read to take with you on your next journey.

Foyles is in the heart of central London not far from Piccadilly Circus, Leicester Square on Charring Cross Road.  I’m so envious of their art-gallery-cum-author-event-space and deep selection of art & photography books.  We attended an Arab Authors night co-hosted with “Words Without Borders” which was standing room only.  Along the wall behind the authors was an art exhibition of photographs from the book “London Street Art” by Prestel press.  You can see the signs that the store has had to respond to competition from the chain stores (including one right across the street), and as a result offers selective discounts at the main entrance but Foyles has also really tried to cultivate departments which cater to niche interest groups including oddly enough a specialty department for Doctors & Veterinarians where you can buy lab coats, scrubs, stethoscopes, doctors bags, along with medical school exam guides, related books and even a full skeleton if you require.

Stanfords may be the largest retail shop in the world specializing in maps & travel books.   Originally known in England as the destination to secure a local Ordinance map, Stanfords has remodeled its space to cater to the numerous visitors that come to that part of London to patronize the large Covent Gardens and shopping environs.  This store is so map-centric, you can find toy globes, note cards and gift wrap with map images and even a shower curtain decorated with a world map.  Travelers must also appreciate their broad selection of travel guides and memoirs when planning their next trip.

The London Book Fair

Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, the Earl’s Court exhibition hall served as host venue to publishers from around the world.  The London Book Fair started nearly 40 years ago as a trade show gathering of publishers.  Across the pond, the American Booksellers Association created their own annual gathering with a focus on booksellers.

Over the years, the London Book Fair has emerged a sprint-filled event for publishers seeking to buy or sell translation and distribution rights for their front and backlist titles.  Unlike the American Book Expo which has a greater emphasis on marketing and promotion of soon to be released titles and the authors & publishers who are promoting them, London really downplays the bookseller’s participation, let alone the visiting American booksellers visit, as Carla Cohen of Politic and Prose observed in her blog, “I walked through the convention center floor today, and there actually was very little for an American bookstore representative to do. We can't order from British publishers and some of the forthcoming books will not be published in the U.S. for six months or a year.”

The British Booksellers Association (BA) which represents booksellers of all varieties including chains, supermarkets, and the independent bookstores had a large floor booth to welcome foot-weary visitors, and organized a handful of seminars with a bookseller focus.  But I can understand why some English booksellers decide to skip the LBF altogether.

Photos and Videos from our London visit

Check out photos of our visit on Flickr here, as well as, Praveen’s video clips on YouTube of Daunt’s (first video, second video, third video, fourth video) and Foyles, and interviews with Carla Cohen of Politics & Prose, Chuck & Dee Robinson of Village Books (first video, second video), and Catherine & Tony of Sam Weller’s.

 

Interview with Steve Piersanti and Johanna Vondeling of Berrett-Koehler Publishers

We are happy to bring to you this interview with Steve Piersanti and Johanna Vondeling of Berrett-Koehler Publishers in San Francisco.  Since we started the Literary Innovators Interviews nearly a year ago, our focus has been on finding and highlighting individuals who are doing unique and innovative work in the literary world.  Steve and Johanna represent a unique publishing enterprise that stands out among its peers for it innovative approach towards community development.  Talking to them we couldn’t help wonder if more publishers will soon start employing some of these ideas.  Tell us what you think.

I have been invited to join Steve and Johanna for BK 2020 Future Search, a two day conference, that brings together nearly 70 participants representing a microcosm of a publishing company’s world.  It promises to unleash new ideas and new relationships.  I will give you an update on the conference soon.

Enjoy! - Praveen

Can you tell us a little about your individual backgrounds.

Johanna: I started in publishing, working as an editorial assistant for Norton in New York while in college.  Then while I was getting my Ph.D. in English Literature I worked as Assistant Editor for Holt, Rinehart & Winston in Austin, Texas.  After I came to the Bay Area I worked for Jossey-Bass for six years and then for the last three years I have been with Berrett-Koehler.  My background is sort of traditional - starting as an English graduate, love of books, began at the bottom of the ladder and have just really enjoyed working with authors – it’s been a real pleasure. 

Steve:  My first taste of publishing was in college when I started a student scholarly journal.  It ended up being virtually a full time job.  There was far more involved than anything I had imagined.  In hindsight, we should have published it quarterly and we were doing it monthly.  The project involved the Art department and the English department, it was multi-disciplinary and very ambitious.  It ended being so much work that I had to drop all my classes just to do it and I lost my scholarship.  I was on a full tuition and fees scholarship.  But I was having so much fun, was learning more than I was learning in any of my classes, so I said to myself “Well I should go into publishing.”

In the end I did get some credit for it and did graduate from college.  After college, I started as a promotional copywriter in advertising with Jossey-Bass in 1977, then became the marketing director, then became an editor, and then editorial director.  Later I went into general management – and eventually became President of the company.  I founded Berrett-Koehler in 1992.

What are your roles at Berrett-Koehler?

Johanna:   Steve wears many hats – he is the President and Publisher and he also signs half of the books we do.  I am the Editorial Director.  I sign the other half of the books and also keep the editorial department generally functioning.  We are doing a lot of different things every single day, for example, outreach to find different authors, preparing different materials to get a book into distribution, some reading manuscripts.  Actually reading manuscripts is such a small percentage of the work I do.  Working with marketing to position the book, talk to design about the cover, we might be strategizing at a larger organizational level about where our risk is, discussing what new agendas and communities we should be investigating.  Every day is different.  I have to balance of lot of things because it’s not only focusing on some book sitting in front of you that are going to come out soon, but also fielding a call with an author whose books came out six years ago, and also cultivating relationships with authors whose books might not come out for another year or two.  So, the range of the timeline I have to think about is enormous.

Steve:  I acquire books, work with authors in developing book projects from idea to concepts to drafts to final publication.  And then as President of the company I work with all the different operations of the company, the department heads, and the Board of Directors.

Berrett-Koehler is famous for the unique ways in which you partner you’re your authors.  Tell us what you do and why you do it. 

Johanna:  Our signature practice is the author days when our authors are invited to come into our office for an entire day and interact with all parts of the our organization.  This ideally takes place at some point between the delivery of the draft and the delivery of the manuscript.  They get to meet their editor in person, they get to talk to production about the internal design of the book, talk to marketing about the marketing plan for their book, and then they make a presentation about their book over lunch to the whole staff – it’s their first chance to pitch their book to the world.  I don’t know any other publisher who does that does that – it will be wonderful if other publishing companies picked this up because they will see a lot of benefit from it.  If you don’t do that, then there is a lot more chance for misunderstanding, but if you sit down and develop a relationship and explain to them early on how publishing works and how the production process works – it reduces chances of misunderstanding and conflict with the author.

I think it’s really wonderful for the authors too – there are many situations where the editor might be the author’s only connection with the publishing company.  We think that with all the shifts that go on during the entire process, it’s a real asset if the author is connected to everyone in the organization, and not just to one person – and that way they also know that they have a relationship for the life of the book, not just for the tenure of the editor.  

Steve:  Most of book publishing is based on a transactional model in which the publishers views that they have bought the book because they paid a certain advance and as a result they often end up treating the author as a nuisance.  Our view is that we don’t own the book, we are a steward and we are accountable to the authors and to our other stakeholders – customers, employees, investors, suppliers, and the communities we operate in – they are all stakeholders in the business.  And we are a steward to operate the business in a partnership – so we bring them inside the tent, into how the organization is run, and into the decision making structure.  What comes out of that is that we try to work with authors as equal partners – we have created some structures that operationalize this approach.  are more friendly towards authors – for example, we have a clause in our publishing agreement that says that if the author is not satisfied then the author can take away the rights of the book.  This is a radical idea in publishing.  

We also have mechanisms like author marketing workshops, author retreats, the Berrett-Koehler authors cooperative, through which we share more information with authors, connect them with each other, helping them learn from each other and creating ways for all of us to learn together.  A lot of benefits come out of this approach.

It sounds like a risky idea to give authors the option to opt out and take away their rights to the book.  Has it ever happened to Berrett-Koehler? 

Steve:  In the fifteen years we have been operating and over several hundred publishing contracts, it has happened only once when an author exercised that clause and took back the rights of the book.  Interestingly in that one case, the author did a new agreement with us to represent the foreign language rights of the book – so we still have a good relationship with that author.  It’s risky in once sense but not risky in another – what it amounts to is putting what you believe on the line.  It provides a way to make us not just lord over the book, and not treat the authors like a nuisance, but makes us responsive by creating a different dynamic.   It’s more of an engaging dynamic, not a transactional dynamic.

It seems that with this practice you have gone against the grain of the how the publishing industry works.  How and when did Berrett-Koehler adopt this approach? 

Steve:  It dates right to the beginning.  And it came out of my experience in the corporate publishing world before I founded Berrett-Koehler.  I was working with Jossey-Bass which got acquired by Robert Maxwell who put Jossey-Bass as a unit of Macmillan Publishing Company which was a big successful company and we became one unit of Macmillan.  I soon found out that the way things worked was that only one thing mattered and that was the new corporate owners.  We had employees who had worked with the company for a long time, authors, suppliers, other stakeholders who had been part of the company but suddenly none of them mattered to the new corporate owners –New owners came in and they were calling all the shots, that didn’t seem like an equitable or effective way to run an organization.  The Berrett-Koehler stance was born out of that distasteful experience with the corporate publishing model.

Johanna:  This is our strategic advantage at the company because the experience it creates for our authors is radical and exciting.  When our authors have a good experience they tell other people about it.  The single largest way in which we discover new authors is from this channel because people have heard good things about us from other authors.

We know we can’t compete with the New York model on money upfront, so we choose to compete in these other ways.

Also, everything that’s going on in the media world with the web 2.0 trend is all about publishing to community.  The fact that Berrett-Koehler has been run since its inception as a community service will be a strategic advantage for us as we head into the turmoil in the future where all the other publishers will have to learn how to adapt and change while we are already half way there.  We are seen as an active positive force in the communities for whom we publish, not just a parasite. 

That’s a really interesting concept – publishing to a community.  How do you describe Berrett-Koehler’s community?

Johanna:  There are many of them.  One of the original and strongest communities we have served  is the organizational development community – organizations like OD Net, SHRM, ASTD, the professional training and development groups.  We have been publishing and serving them – it’s been a very very solid component of our list for long.

For our current affairs list, we provide a lot of services to the progressive community, that you can define that in many different ways.  Our mission with respect to the progressive community is exposing the consolidation of power that’s happening and offering alternative ideas and views. We are looking for authors from this community and actively collaborating with organizations in this community. 

Steve:  Our community is basically people who are trying to bring about change in their organizations, their businesses, their personal lives, and in the world.  Some of them are doing it through consulting to organizations, others are doing it as activists, yet others as instructors, or authors, writers, speakers.  But they are all trying to bring about change to make things better.  Some times it’s just to make managers treat people decently.  Other times it is to change the political power structures.  It’s people who have an interest in these ideas and they reside in lots of different places including fields like the organization development field, the progressive field, executive coaches, etc.  And all these people understand each other.  There is something they all share in common that bridges their differences.

Tell us more about Berrett-Koehler’s mission – Creating a world that works for all, and how does it relate to what you publish? 

Johanna:  It’s a very big and ambitious mission.  There are lots of people around the planet who believe in something like this.  Our contribution towards this mission is by publishing content that helps this goal.  We aspire to publish books that promote positive change at all levels – personal, organizational, and national and global.  So, our list is roughly divided into those three categories – BK Life, BK Business, BK Currents.

Our personal development list is devoted to books that we hope will help people align their personal practices with their aspirations for a better world.  Our business list is about how to create more progressive leadership practices, organizations practices, and cultures.   There are lots of business publishers out there who are anti corporate.  We are not anti corporate or anti business.  What differentiates us is our radically democratic streak.  Our focus is on books that talk about how we can make workplaces work for all how to make them collaborative so they are serving everyone not just the investors. 

At a global and national level – we are looking for books that shine a light on the consolidation of economic and political power and offering alternatives to that consolidation.   So there is the streak of democratic pre-occupation that runs thru our entire list and we see that feeding into the mission of working for all.

Steve:  Intentionally we don’t spell it out in detail.  As a general aspiration most people know what that means.  “Creating a better world that works ” means you are trying to bring some change – that it’s effective, sustainable, good things are happening and “for all” means that everyone shares in that world.  There is some meaning in the words, and beyond that we intentionally leave it open ended because the idea is that it is a continuous aspiration, we never arrive there.  And we don’t want it to become dogmatic.  As Johanna was saying, change has to be at all levels – personal, organizational, national and global.  Some times people get too focused on one of these like the political system.  Our view is that we need change at all levels.  We paint it in pretty broad brush strokes. 

Do you see yourself expanding beyond these genres?

Johanna:  I think we will be very careful about that.  In this world, the format is a lot less relevant than the audience you are publishing for and the community you are publishing for.  You have to serve value to the community you are serving.  And you can only serve so many communities at the same time.  For us to be successful, we will have to very disciplined about what communities are we serving.

In what other ways is Berrett-Koehler different than other publishers? 

Steve:  We have to acknowledge that we are more alike than different. We are in the same environment.  We sell thru same channels, have same processes to produce books, so much of what we do is the same.  We are different in philosophy, mindset, and approach.

What is a publisher?  Publisher is more than the staff or the books, what really are as a publisher is nerve center.  We are center of this ecosystem of manuscript reviewers, publicists, distributors, booksellers, staff, authors, and our role is to operate this enterprise as a connector for everyone’s benefit.  Within the company there are a lot of differences, the company has a open egalitarian structure of compensation and human resource policies.  We don’t have an executive compensation structure – one compensation structure applies to everyone.  Lot of decisions about the company are done at the monthly staff meeting where everyone can add an item to the agenda and everyone has a voice.  We are less hierarchical than other publishers.  We are more multi-channel than other publishers.  We are focused on trade, but also direct.  We market thru a lot of channels like special channels, conferences and meetings where authors are presenting. 

All members of the stakeholder community are shareholders of Berrett-Koehler which is a pretty unusual model.  Most publishers are owned by the founder or the founding family or were acquired by a big conglomerate and become a division.  We have about 180 shareholders.  Authors, customers, suppliers, employees, publishing community, colleagues – they are all represented.  We consciously wanted the company to be owned by all our stakeholder groups. 

How does this unique structure impact the day-to-day working of the company?

Steve:  Every one have a bigger stake in the company.  They have to operate the company for everyone’ benefit, it’s a stewardship model.  

So, with Berrett-Koehler being the nerve center of it’s stakeholder community, what’s your core competence?  What do you have to be really good at?

Steve:  Our core competence is to be nexus of information.  We are more conscious of that and we take it further.  We are not a printing company, it’s like a movie studio model where you bring together all these resources to produce a movie.  We move information around from authors to staff to designers to printers to distributors, to booksellers.

Another core competence for us is new product introductions – every book is a new product introduction.  You have to find the product, create the product, rework the product, produce the product, package it, name it, price it, warehouse it, market it, sell it.

The volume of new product introductions is very high in the publishing industry because the average product only creates a $100-200,000 of revenue.  So your competency becomes your ability to manage the development and introduction of products for small amounts of money.  Every one talks about returns makes publishing unusual.  That is significant but it pales in comparison to new product introductions. 

Let’s take Ford Motor company as an example.  They are a $160 Billion company and I counted on their website they list 59 products.  And here at Berrett-Koehler we are 2,000 times smaller and we have 400 products and we introduce 30-35 new ones every year. And Ford introduces six or seven new products a year.  There are a lot of sales conference and sometimes the entire sales conference can be about introducing one new product.  You go to a publishing industry conference and you will see a distributor introducing 300 or 400 new products.  So, our core competence is managing that many new product introductions.  And there can be two hundred parties who have a role in introducing that new product.  That’s what makes is complex and challenging.

How are the economics of the business – similar or different than other publishers?

Steve:  Again they are more alike than different – we have similar cost structure for printing books.  They are only different because we don’t pay advances and we have higher staff marketing expense given the number of books we publish (30-35 books a year).  The multi-channel marketing model is more expensive.  We work more closely with authors which takes time.  

We have been profitable for the last four years.  We lost some money in 2002 when the book market collapsed after 9/11.  But the company is in fairly good financial health.

What have been the biggest accomplishments for Berrett-Koehler in 15 years?

Steve:  Right out of the gate we had a best seller called Leadership and The New Science that has sold 350,000 copies.  Even more than the level of sales, it was a success because it has been highly influential, it has been a seminal book, and has affected tens of thousands of people about the way they see leadership and management.  We have had several successes like that.  When Corporations Rule the World was one of the most influential books in the anti corporate movement making people rethink if all this corporate expansion and domination of the world is really what we want.  It sold more than 130,000 copies.

Lot of books we have published have sold well as well as influenced many people. 

Overall, we have about 27 books have sold over a 100,000 copies.  That’s one measure of success.  Another measure of success is cultivating this community of people who are trying to practice their work, their business, their leadership in different ways.

What would Berrett-Koehler look like in the future?

Steve:  That’s why we are doing the future search.  I don’t have the grand vision.  There are certain commitments we will stick to.  For example, taking care of the interest of all our stakeholder groups – that’s the kind of ground rule that guide us.  I don’t know what we are going to be in 5-10-15 years from now.  The model of the future search is you bring together all your stakeholder groups – that’s what is going to create the vision.  It’s not Steve, a consultant or the executive team that creates the vision.

There are many authors in the LitMinds community and they would love to know what you look for in an author you sign?

Steve:  First of all, we look for authors who have bold and new ideas.  Second, the content has to stand out in a crowded market,  the author has to have a way of conveying those new ideas in a way that will get people excited.  Third, authors who have communities that they will be involved with.  Fourth, we are looking for authors who do quality work, they are knowledgeable, have real substance, and are experts on their topics.  Fifth, they have to be good to work with and will do their part.  They will flourish under our approach and not say “this is too much of a burden.”

Michael Chabon who had a big summer hit with Yiddish Policeman's Union is slated to open the festival with a talk on his newly released serial novel Gentleman on the Road.  Also in the line-up is funny-guy Michel Wex "Born to Kvetch" and "Just Say Nu," and acclaimed Israeli novelist Meir Shalev who'll discuss A Pigeon and A Boy.

You can find the full schedule here.  Shalom and see you at the Bookfest! 

LitMinds invited the festival's founders, Jane Ganahl and Jack Boulware, to share this behind-the-scenes look with us covering the origins of Litquake, their journey to keep the festival going and growing, and some of their cherished memories.  We were also able to catch the volunteers  doing god's work for a unique photo-op at the Marsh Cafe in Mission.  Enjoy!

Tell us a little about your personal backgrounds.

Jane: I grew up south of San Francisco - close enough to experience the Summer of Love and be enormously influenced by it as a young person. I was too busy having fun in college to figure out what I wanted to do - until I discovered writing when I was 21. I didn't get a job writing until i was in my early 30s. I worked in daily newspapers for 24 years. And I was a single mother for most of my daughter's life. Those two things impacted me enormously - both for the better.

Jack: I grew up on a cattle ranch in Montana. As a kid I read a lot of books, made radio plays and 8mm movies with my friends. In 1980s San Francisco, I launched two magazines using pirated desktop software, and have been making a living as a writer for the past 15 years.

How and when did you start Litquake? How did the idea originate? What were the initial goals?
The Litquake festival’s first year was 2002. In 1999 and 2000 Jane and I also organized a similar one-day event called Litstock, which was held outdoors. We did it for two years, and then the dot-com crash hit the city. People were depressed and there wasn’t much interest. But throughout the year, we found that people really missed it, and so did we. So we revived the idea with a new group of volunteers, and relaunched with a new name. Coincidentally that year, a study was published that named San Francisco as the number one city in America, for per-capita consumption of both books and alcohol. So we knew we were onto something. Both festivals were conceived at the Edinburgh Castle Literary Pub in the Tenderloin, birthplace of many great (and questionable) ideas.

From the beginning, we wanted to celebrate the written word, and make it more of an event rather than just another reading with 10 people sitting in chairs. Every author has done those readings and they’re not very much fun. There were lots of small reading series springing up around the city, and our festival was an opportunity to present several of them to a larger audience. We kept the readings fairly short, to keep the pace moving, with live music in between, and this also meant there would be more room to include more authors. The concept has not changed -- a writer reads a short excerpt of their own work, enough to give the audience a flavor. And if people like what they hear, they can seek out more and buy the books. We did not want to have any sort of trade show element. At the time, there were other events in San Francisco that catered to the publishing industry. We envisioned it as something that could grow and rank on par with the city’s other festivals devoted to jazz and film and blues. And we didn’t want it to be boring. Have you ever watched BookTV? It’s like taking Vicodin.

What has been the most satisfying part about being the founders and organizers of Litquake for eight years? What have been some of the challenges?
One of the big challenges is obviously money to keep it going. San Francisco boasts an insane number of nonprofit organizations, all competing for the same benefactors and grants. We are a city of givers, but there’s only so much to spread around. The literary arts never receives as much assistance as the other disciplines. And despite our wealth, America is traditionally not as generous with funding the arts as other countries, especially in Europe. So we’ve been really lucky to receive some key grants and financial donations that have kept us afloat. And sheer determination from so many volunteers have helped plan and produce the events since the beginning.

It’s always cool to see so many people come out and support the written word, because there’s so much competition for the public’s imagination these days. Reading and writing is a solitary occupation, and when you make it social, it’s an opportunity to see just how many people still value words and language. It’s really wonderful in particular, to watch people running down the street during the Lit Crawl. Imagine, people running to see a literary reading! One year of the Lit Crawl, a certain pub refused at the last minute to turn down the music for our reading, so everyone moved out onto the sidewalk, somebody set up a chair, and one by one the authors stood on top of the chair and did their readings. People were standing around listening with beers, cars were slowing down to see what was going on. It was like a scene out of 19th century London, with the ranters in Hyde Park.

Tell us about any particular Litquake event that was memorable for you?
Every single event has some great moments, it’s hard to remember all of them. The first Lit Crawl. Irvine Welsh’s reading at the first Litquake was electric. Ishmael Reed bravely doing his reading in a stiff wind to close the 99 fest at the Golden Gate Park Bandshell. The entire opening night of 2005 devoted to the 50th anniversary of the first reading of Allen Ginsberg’s “HOWL.” Seeing Winona Ryder in the audience, scribbling in a notebook. Hearing Ferlinghetti read his poem “Lit.Quake” which was all about our festival, it was really moving; he allowed us to post it up on our website. At the 2002 closing party at the Phoenix Hotel, poet and novelist Kim Addonizio suddenly stripped down to her underwear and jumped in the swimming pool, and she was helped out by a group of sailors, who were in town for Fleet Week. That was nice to see.

How do you think Litquake has impacted the literary life of San Francisco?
It’s difficult to say. Since we’ve been doing the festival, more bookstores have closed their doors. But there are also a lot more events and writers’ groups than I’ve seen in a long time. At the very least, people know there’s a big festival every October, where they can see and hear literature for free, or very little money.

What new things can people expect this year from Litquake?
The Literary Death Match, more youth poetry, more long-form events that feature one or two authors in an extended conversation. And more authors and events than ever before!

What advice or tips would you have for people who want to organize similar literary festivals elsewhere?

Jack: Be resourceful and don’t make it boring.

Jane: Draft excellent volunteers. Hire a publicist as soon as you get a little money. Start local and build from there. Know your audience. And don't make it boring.

The Dream Team of volunteers at their last big meeting before the show begins...

You can find out more about this year's Litquake happenings here, buy tickets to the opening night honoring Armistead Maupin here. 

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.

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.

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.

LitMinds was recently invited to interview the accomplished author Julia Alvarez.  Julia is on a hectic national tour for her new book Once Upon a Quinceañera, Coming of Age in the USA.  We spoke to Julia by phone about the changing face of American literature, her views about being a writer, and how she balances a life of action with a life of reflection.   Enjoy!

You started writing in the late 60’s and 70’s when Latino literature or writers were unheard of and literature which focused on the lives of non-white, non mainstream characters was considered of ethnic interest only.  What made you write about topics that very few people were interested in?

Well, you hit the nail on the head.  I have been lucky that in my lifetime there has been a  sea-change in American literature.  When I started writing in mid 60’s as a teenager, anything that was written by ethnics people, that were not of the mainstream, was considered sociology.  We were not part of American literature. 

[It was] African American writers who opened the canon.  There is a famous poem by Langston Hughes called "I, Too, Sing America" that talks about how he and other black writers were relegated to the kitchen of American literature; they were not allowed at the table.  But he says one day we will be at the big table.  It was very prophetic! 

And then Latino writers and Asian-American writers followed, the demographic started to grow, and then mainstream publishers realized what smaller, literary regional publishers already knew.   Around this time Bless me, Ultima by Rudolfo Anaya sold 300,000 copies and mainstream publishers said “Wow, what’s going on here?”

My first novel wasn’t published till I was 41 and I had already been writing for over 20 years.  It was just luck that in the mid 80’s we had this boom of multi-cultural writers like Gabriel García Márquez and all of a sudden Americans were discovering literature from south of their border.  [This in turn] might have made for some opening towards Latinos in this country.

Can you also shed some light on how you have picked the topics you have written about?

Well, I believe we are story tellers, we are all from tribes, and we tell stories of our tribes.  We hope literature is about different tribes coming together and all of our stories coming together make literature a bigger story.  I think in general we write about things that are our stories and things that move us and puzzle us and things we question and those are the things that come from our own experience.

If John Updike comes out with a new novel and it has a white male protagonist, nobody questions why he is writing about this.  No one says “Is this autobiographical?”  But when an ethnic person writes about people of her/ his ethnicity, people say “Is that about your family?” It’s as if the default characters and material of American literature has that old bias that it has to be about mainstream characters or you must be writing about your own experience.

How do you see American literature evolve in the future.  Already when we look at bestseller lists we regularly see books like Khaled Hosseini’s "Kite Runner" and "A Thousand Splendid Suns" which are not about mainstream characters.  So, if we move forward another 10-20-30 years what is American literature going to look like?

As I mentioned, we all come local habitations and we have our little individual tribes and stories.  However we are all one human family and literature has always known that stories are about being one human being.  We are seeing all the diversity and variety of who we are and that’s going to happen more and more.  The world is flat!  You are in San Francisco and I am in Miami and I am reading Gao Xingjian’s Nobel prize winning book, a translation of course.  Stories are about being human and the different versions and varieties that comes from our specific culture make literature richer and we find out about all kinds of people.  More and more of that will happen as the world shrinks and we get more curious about people we are coming in contact with.  We are trying to understand who we all are and who we have to share this planet with.

Literature will reflect more and more those kind of combinations and diversities and because we are so mobile and because we are mixing with each other.  I met a Dominican who was married to a Japanese woman and they live in California!  Look at Barack Obama.  When would you have thought that an African American with a father from Africa and mother from mid-west could run for president.  Literature has never been about being a gated community and literature is always teaching us that we have to understand and become each other.

Let’s talk about your new book "Once Upon a Quinceañera."  How did the book change you?  And How did it change the way you view the Latino community in the US?

That’s a good question.  Every book you write changes you.  Even as a reader you enter a book and you go through very fine and imperceptible adjustments and then you come out a different person.  This is especially true of a book that really moves you.  And it happens even more strongly when you write it. "Once Upon a Quinceañera" is my first real non-fiction.  I wrote a non-fiction before but it was individual essays.  With this new book I learned new skills.  People think that because you are a writer you must write about things because you know things.  I write about things because I want to learn those things.  I had to learn new things about being a journalist, traveling, interviewing people, researching, gathering materials, all of that stuff – you do that when you are writing a novel but in a more informal way.  Here this is the material of the book.  This book was written on an invitation.  At first I thought “Oh my god, you got the wrong person for this book.”  I am not into Quinceañeras and all that girly girl stuff.  But then the editor was persistent and he sent me a DVD of a documentary that PBS did in Boston.  It was about a single mother throwing her daughter into a Quinceañera.  I saw it and got hooked.  I saw that by studying this tradition I could use it as a lens to see what was happening to the Latino community in the US.   Because what’s interesting is that we come here as Dominicans, Peruvians, Mexicans, Salvadorians, and suddenly we come here and we are Latinos.  We were never Latinos before!  We come here and are creating an amalgam and culture made up of all different traditions mixing, and growing, and changing, and evolving and that’s what’s rich about tradition and culture that they keep growing - that they are not packaged and dead things.  It was interesting for me to look at the Quinceañera and see through it what are some of the issues and some of the things that are happening to the Latino community.  Let’s face it I live in Vermont.  I wasn’t getting to see what was happening, this came to me as an opportunity to find out.

Who should read this book and why?

I think there are two types of people who I imagine would be interested in this book.  First is people in the Latino community - we are here and things are happening to us.  We need to reflect about what is happening and have conversation about what is happening.  We need to be talking about what traditions means to us and are they serving us and whether they need to be revised.  I don’t have a message.  I think it is about having a conversation and being aware.  And being consciente about what is happening to us.  

Another demographic that would find the book interesting is the rest of the culture.  We think that by 2050 one in four American women will be Hispanic.  So, we are talking about a major part of American population.  We already see a Latin-ization of American culture.  Girls that are not Latinos are having Quinceañeras.  The music is catching on, the food is catching on.  So, the general reader who might be curious about these new Americans and the people that are changing the United States of America, would find this book interesting as well.  Every immigrant group that has ever come before us has had an impact on what America.

We have a lot of new and emerging authors in the LitMinds community.  Like most new authors they are always interested in how to market their books, how to find their audience, how to make money by writing.  What advice can you share based on your years as a writer?

Maybe I am not the best person in this arena.  My first novel wasn’t published till I was 41.  I would say you should be doing this if this is your calling, if this is your passion.  Who doesn’t want affirmation and success.  Success means you have readers.  We are not writers till we have readers.  A book doesn’t come alive till we have readers.  I am not minimizing that.  But it is so uncertain, and who knows who gets rewarded in their lifetime and who doesn’t.  In hindsight we look at a certain painter or writer and we say my goodness this is a classic novel and this is great painter but maybe in their life they were not appreciated.  So, you have to have that passion where you feel that this is my calling, that this is what you need to do, whether rewards come or not.  Persistence works because you get some inherent pleasure – you need to do this to be alive – you need to do this to understand yourself.  It’s something you need to do like breathe, so you do it.  And yes, you have to figure out how to earn a living as a writer.  I became a teacher like many writers.  It’s only now in my life I am able to be a writer full time who teaches on the side.  If you are really committed to this because this what you feel you need to do then don’t let anyone talk you out of it. 

A lot of my young students ask me how can they get published.  I tell them to focus on the writing because when the writing is good enough it will find a publisher.  Publishers are a lot more open now in some ways to writers of different sorts.  People are constantly asking me “Should I go to an MFA program?”  I think you learn writing by writing!  There is something to be gained by having wonderful readers who are also writers who can also be your mentors.  You can get focused attention.  In some of the MFA programs you can be a Teaching Assistant and devote 1-2 years to your writing careers.  And many times the MFA thesis can end up being your first published book.  But it’s not the only way and not every writer benefits from that.  I go to a lot of conferences – I used to go as a young writer to them too.  Conferences can help because by lstening to writers talk about their craft you can get good tips on your writing, and not to minimize networking – you kind of learn the vocabulary of what I call the book business.  That’s the old fashioned way.  Now young writers are writing blogs and self-publishing – it’s maybe how literature is changing and will happen beyond my lifetime – I am not sure.

Main thing is this you write because you love to do it and you think this is your calling.  Nothing can substitute applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.

Last question - tell us about Café Alta Gracia?  How did you get involved with organic farming?  What’s the connection with the literary world?

Well, you know one of my heroes has always been Grace Paley.  What I love about her is she is a wonderful writer, very generous, very humane being, and she walks the talk.  She is very politically active.  There is a division between a life of action and life of reflection.  Writers are often interested in issues but they are academically involved, arm chair involved.  And sometimes in your life you walk into a situation and you are really challenged to get involved in terms of your own action.  What happened was that I was doing a writing assignment in the mountains of Dominican Republic for the Nature Conservancy.  They were putting together an anthology where they were asking different writers to visit different sites around the world and write short stories based on going there – so I went there and met a cooperative of small farmers who had banded together against the big agri-business plantations who were exploiting the land, planting hundred and hundred of acres of pineapples and there was no food for local people.  This group of local farmers was growing organic coffee under shade which was the traditional way to grow coffee before the big plantations discovered that if they could cut down all the trees they could plant more coffee and make more money but it destroys the land for future generations.  But these farmers didn’t even have money for pesticides.  So when I did the story I got really fired up.  And my husband grew up on a farm in Nebraska and he had seen the same thing happen there.  So when they asked us if we would get involved to tell their story and help bring their coffee to the US where they could get better prices and better market.  My first reaction was “We can’t do this we live in Vermont.”  But my husband said “How can we not help them?”  And that’s how we got involved in buying an abandoned farmland, reforesting it, planting coffee, pulling the community together and bringing it here – and now it’s going on 10 years. 

About the 4th year – we realized that were taking care of the land, but what about the people they couldn’t even read and write.  None of them - the kids, the parents, the grandparents.  Nobody knew how to read or write.  And that’s why they couldn’t access this market.  So, we started a school on the farm to teach them how to read and write.  I see this as part of a larger grass roots movement where active communities are trying to change the way the world works they are saving the world!

Anthologies are hot.

Women writers are hot.

Intense sharing sessions on paper and in person have become a recent theme.  Nearly simultaneously, at least three anthologies by women writers were released this summer.

• Bad Girls: 26 Writers Misbehave

• The Other Woman: 21 Wives, Lovers, and Others Talk Openly About Sex, Deception, Love and Betrayl

• The Bigger the Better, the Tighter the Sweater: 21 Funny Women on Beauty, Body Image and Other Hazards of Being Female
  

I don't know about you... but generally I enjoy a good anthology.  Anthologies (a collection of literary works usually by numerous writers) can be a great way to discover new writers. And, they usually offer a dose of thoughtful prose on the morning commute or before heading to bed. 

According to industry insiders, the success of the Best American Series – which has introduced annual tomes of best magazine writing, best non-required reading, best travel writing, best science writing, best sports writing, and so on – has spurred NY publishers to snap up any book proposal from a well respected writer who’s willing to cajole friends and colleagues into a small literary contribution to a larger work.

The book events for anthologies can be interesting too.  Instead of 1 hour, 1 author, there are a handful of writers on stage who read a snippet of their essay (often with very personal and intimate details) – and the Q&A hopefully ensues into an actual conversation between writers.  As Ellen Sussman described the experience for writers whose professions demand a fairly solitary existence, “It’s great to be on tour with my posse.” 

A fair warning, the above mentioned collections are highly estrogen filled.  But, the collections tackle tough subjects including rocky relationships, body issues, cheating lovers, disappearing youth and survival.  The stories are often humorous and always intimately personal.     And, most importantly, they touch on a shared female experience to which all women can relate.

 
You can read Megan's LitMinds profile here and discuss this interview here.