Month: September 2023

Architecture professor William Hubbard once claimed that buildings were always part of at least three different sets of discourses. 

• There’s the discourse of order: has this building been rigorous about the way that it solves formal problems? Has it set interesting problems in the first place? This is an intellectual conversation, having to do with the building’s contributions to the theory and practice of the discipline.
• There’s the discourse of worth: Is this building efficient? Does it promote the goals of the organization that bought it? Has it helped its clients teach better, heal better, work better? Has it made the client more profitable? This is an instrumental conversation, having to do with the business goals that the building advances.
• And then there’s the discourse of values: Does it promote the community? Does it “fit in” with the surroundings? Does it help bring us together and make us proud of our place? This is a community conversation, having to do with the way that a building does or does not promote collective ideals.

Different viewers of any building will not only have different opinions about it, but those opinions will be based in entirely different conversations. It’s no surprise that we don’t always like the same things.

I think that writing also responds to these same three discourses, and probably other ones as well

Literary critic Wendy Lesser reads for intellectual pleasure. She writes, “I live with, and through, literature. That, I suppose, is what I am hoping to transmit—that sense of connection with something other than oneself and one’s friends and one’s life in this time. Reading literature is a way of reaching back to something bigger and older and different. It can give you the feeling that you belong to the past as agent well as the present, and it can help you realize that your present will someday be someone else’s past. This may be disheartening, but it can also be strangely consoling at times.”

The literary agent Janet Reid reads for economic value. “What I’m looking for isn’t a checklist. If I read something and like it (a lot!) I will consider whether I think I can sell it. I will consider how much I can sell it for. I will consider whether the author appears to be someone I can work with or if they are giving off Nutso Vibes. I’ll look at other books on my list and consider if this fits or overlaps with my current clients. A lot of those specific “things I’m looking for” are in fact responses to what we think will sell. There’s been a surge in demand for books that specifically reflect diversity in race and ethnicity, rather than the characters simply being default white.  Some of the requests reflect our knowledge of holes in the market. And some of it is just us yapping about what we like to read.”

The novelist Jennifer Weiner reads, and writes, for emotional support. During a conference talk, Weiner said there’s a “political impact of escapism. I wrote my first book almost as a life raft to the girl I had once been. I wanted girls like me—who felt ugly, or fat, or lonely, or like it was never going to get better—to be able to read something and think maybe it will. Why do we read? Yes, to understand the world, and, of course, to meet characters that are alive and visceral. But, at least to me, sometimes we do read to make friends. Sometimes we do read to escape, or find comfort, or to spend time in a world that is a little more fair and a little more kind than the world that we inhabit.”

Spend some time thinking about the things you’ve read in the last year that you really loved. And then try to write down the reasons why it was so wonderful. Those are the reasons that should motivate us, as well. We should be writing what we love to read.

We were talking with a friend this evening, whose partner was off for the second week of her bowling league. Every Tuesday night for thirty weeks. Nora said, “that’s why your writing course is going from fall through spring, right? Old habits die hard.”

---

We talk a lot about “doing the research for a book,” but I think we mean several different things when we say that. I’ll give you some examples.

My most recent book was set in the contemporary world, so I didn’t have to go back in time and try to figure out who was President or what might have been on the radio. I didn’t have to recreate world affairs or natural disasters.

The story was, however, set in a different place. Specifically, the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, commonly known as the U. P. I went to college in the U. P. between 1976 and 1978, driving through that remarkably unpopulated landscape four times a year. The U. P. is about twice the size of Vermont, and has fewer than half as many people. The biggest city, Marquette, is just barely larger than Rutland. The U. P. has a mythological place in my mind, a colony of Detroit and Boston that shipped out all of its raw materials (iron ore, copper ore, timber, and smart children) only to get nearly nothing in return. 

I don’t live in the U. P., and I haven’t been there for decades. So I had some work to do: driving around Alger County on Google Maps Street View, for instance, or looking up the County’s governmental structure. Finding out whether the former prominence of Finnish and Welsh family names still held, finding out how far one would have to drive to buy a new car or a new snowmobile. Learning where the hospital would be, learning where the schools would be, learning how long it would take to drive to Shingleton, or to Marquette, or to the Mackinac Bridge. Learning how to pronounce cudighi, the U. P.’s unofficial official sandwich. Those are all examples of one kind of research, the sort of factual things that make a place or a job feel realistic. They are necessary—we’re not allowed to get those wrong. But they’re far from sufficient.

There’s other research that we do all day every day; we live around people and see how they dress, listen to how they talk. The imaginary town of Cornwall, Michigan is the same size as the real-world town of Middletown Springs. That means some things for everyday life: about gossip at the general store and the dump, about grudges held and about alliances strengthened. Rural life everywhere is filled with second-guessing, because rural people all have to do a lot of things well enough rather than a few things really well. So lots of guys have built a garage or graveled their driveway, and they think they know how to do it. That means everybody else is wrong. (Nora and I joke that the Vermont state motto should be “Huh… don’t know that I’d have done it THAT way…”) Same is true for pie crusts, quilts, engine repair, gardening… there’s just endless commentary about other people and their errors. Because really, in a town of 800 people, what else is there to talk about?

All of that is important, but still falls a little shy of the kind of research that I love most.

I was about to write a scene in which our protagonist Angie was asked to look over a crime site—her boyfriend’s summer cabin that had been taken over for winter use as a combination of meth lab and housing. I’ve never been in a meth lab. I don’t know what that looks like. I know it’s not clean science, like a hospital lab; it’s poor people, poorly educated, who are trying to make a dangerous product without much infrastructure. So I googled “meth lab,” and chose “images,” and saw this. 

What a remarkably rich portrait of shattered lives. The clutter, the trash. The stained walls. The plastic tubing running into and out of plastic bottles, the propane tank and the cooler. The scale. The single rubber glove draped over the edge of the sink. The deer rifle propped against the counter. The fucking teddy bear, and the same colors on the onesie on the chair next to it.

That’s what the research was for. To let me live in it. To let me understand not merely the technical facts but the despair. The research was all about experiential understanding. And it became this.

Once Sunday came, Angie met Kate at the shop, then drove out to meet the State Police at Grant’s cabin. Given that the house was a crime scene, they had to come to agreement out in the snow about what they could and couldn’t touch, where they could and couldn’t walk. 

As they were about to go up the stairs to the deck, Kate said, “You ready for this? It’s probably going to feel pretty ugly.”

“No, I ain’t ready, but we’re gonna do it anyway. Let’s go.” The trooper slid the patio door open, and Kate walked in, Angie right behind.

The curtains were all torn down and had been used as blankets, draped all over the couch and wadded into the arms of chairs. Bed pillows and couch pillows and stuffed animals alike had been pressed into dormitory service. The toolbox and chainsaw from the truck were up against the kitchen counter, the handgun and radio next to the sink. 

The breakfast table had been pushed up against the wall. On it, a Blue Rhino propane tank, an ice chest, and plastic tubing running back and forth between them, the wallpaper and ceiling above it scorched and smoke-stained. A deer rifle propped against the counter. A plastic bale of Walmart house-brand diapers, sized for six- to twelve-month-olds, on the floor next to it.

Trash everywhere. On the floors, on the furniture, on the counters, spilling out of the lower cupboards. Empty cans for soup and beer alike. Dirty clothes, infant through adult, a Goodwill dumpster of ragged clothes and boots and sneakers and slippers.

All of this, where Angie and Grant had had their fill of one another every day and night for the past few summers. 

She hadn’t walked ten feet, but couldn’t bear any more, turned and walked back outdoors. She felt colder than she had after her rescue, but a different kind, the cold that comes from a familiar story replaced by something obscene. Kate came out to join her. “Come on, let’s go.” She walked Angie out to the one-ton, put her into the passenger seat and drove away.

And then, what Angie had seen haunted her through the rest of the day:

Angie and the crew went about their workdays, prepping for the afternoon snow, clearing a couple of frozen culverts to clear an ice wash over a back road, and then out with all three plow trucks until about eight in the evening. But the normal shop banter didn’t lift her mood for more than a few seconds. Her usual ability to be present, to see every leaf and every reflector and every visitor in a driveway, was hampered by the visual aura of that cabin. Of the lives that it represented. Which one of those young men had been the captain of the football team, the lead of the school play? Which one of those young women had been aiming to be a high school science teacher like Betsy? And what would become of a baby born to that home? How could any child climb from that hole, a hole that it had no responsibility for digging? A hole that was its only birthright?

We care about our characters, so it’s crucial that we really understand what it’s like to live that way. So an awful lot of my research is on the fly, scene by scene and day by day. What do I need to know in order to understand this moment? It’s research about the way people live, far more than about the nature of the fabrics they wore or the members of their favorite TV show. The research isn’t done to show OUR authority as writers; it’s to give us a better sense of the inner lives of our characters, to give THEM the density and authority that readers need in order to care about them. 

“Everybody is trying to sell the project to the next person in line.”

Jenna Johnson, Executive Editor, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Nora and I and our friend went down to the Southern Vermont Arts Center yesterday, to see the Red Dress exhibition. Highly recommended.

But that’s not my job in this space. What I want to talk about is the gift shop. Museum gift shops mostly contain the same array of stuff. Books and small objects related to the current exhibit. Arts and crafts by local professionals. Kids toys that promote creativity. And books about art in general. All of it aimed at people who’ve just had their ideas challenged or their eyes pleased, and who imagine staying in that state just a little bit longer.

So I bought a book. A Year in the Art World: An Insider’s View, by Matthew Israel. It’s a fascinating look into the world of people who make art, who make art possible, and who make art “important.” Each of its fifteen brief chapters is dedicated to one example of a field involved in the value chain of fine art. The first of those chapters is about “the artist.” The other fourteen are not.

Fabricators, gallery directors, museum directors, art fairs, artist estates, art writers, curators, biennial exhibitions, art schools, art online, art advisors, auction houses, conservators, and shippers/warehousers. Fourteen separate industries dependent on the fragile work of that first one, back there with the sketchpad and the weird ideas.

Some substantial majority of those players have to agree that the artist has done something important in order for the artist to enter the contemporary conversation. In some ways, it’s akin to the peer review process in academia, in which a bunch of specially-trained professionals exercise their informed judgement on work within their field.

The way it differs, though, is important. And that difference is that they all need to make money from the transaction. So their judgment of the work is always ecological, about the work within the contemporary market. “There’s no market for it” is a low consideration to the artist, and crucial to each of the other fourteen.

---

Let’s look at how this plays out in books. I’ll use my 2019 book The Adjunct Underclass as an example.

I’d written an earlier book, The PhDictionary, that was published through the University of Chicago Press. I had a clear audience in mind for that one: young adults in grad school or having recently gotten their PhDs, who had come from outside the higher ed industry and thus didn’t know any of the unspoken rules and customs that would come back to smack them in the face if they stepped the wrong way. That book did okay, selling 1,411 copies as of June 30 of this year. But my editor at Chicago, the brilliant Elizabeth Branch Dyson, knew the market, and asked me to write a book that wouldn’t have occurred to me on my own.

So I did. I conducted all of the research and had all of the ideas and wrote all of the text. I was supported in that work by the equivalent of the fabricators: Elizabeth giving me conceptual guidance, and the gifted (and patient) copy editor Renaldo Migaldi making sure that my text was both correct and elegant.

But after it left my hands, it entered a machine that I’d never considered.

Elizabeth had already gained approval for the book by the Press’s editorial team and its board of directors, but once it was near the finish line, she passed it off to two other groups: production and marketing. On the production side, the book designer created a comfortable page logic and a lovely cover, and then it went to a print shop. But on the marketing side: Wow.

They generated a list of a hundred or so reviewers who would each get a free copy. They made posters for the London Book Fair, where the Press introduced its Spring 2019 releases, and sent one or more folks to that event as well. They carted the book off to other trade shows in higher ed and in education research. They pitched the book to major bookseller chains, and to major book distributors. They plowed and fertilized so that the book’s tender little seed might sprout.

Then the reviewers themselves went to work. Some of them were within the world of literature, some within the world of higher ed, some within the world of labor relations. Each of them put the book into conversation with their own thinking and interests, and presented the resulting discussions to their own readership.

Booksellers themselves. From the Amazon behemoth down to the small indy shops, individual buyers had to decide whether and how many. (A couple of those stores invited me to come talk, which was fun, too.) How and where do those books get placed within the vast snowdrifts of ideas that comprise every good bookstore? Is it “new and notable,” or is it just slotted spinewise on its designated shelf, elbowing its way into the crowd like a subway passenger in the morning rush?

And then, finally, readers. Thank you. I’ve made some good friends through that book, people who would otherwise have been completely unknown to me but who have become trusted voices through our correspondence.

As of June 30, that book has been translated into traditional and modernized Chinese, and made into an audiobook. In its original form, it’s sold 4,275 copies, 71 of which (1.7%) were during the most recent fiscal year. Its current Amazon ranking is #647,157 of all books. Now four years old, it’s entered the geriatric phase of its life, available at half price twice a year from the Press’s warehouse sales.

There have been so many people along the way, each of whom had to decide that the book was worthy of participating in their discourse. I’m grateful to all of them, but it makes me aware of just how big, and how selective, the machine is. And how many good writers won’t get through the doors.