Her book Temple of Air is coming out this fall.

She was also recently kind enough to include me in her blog series, Views from the Keyboard.

They descend on our fields, neck-deep in crops dusted with pesticides, the spore of new construction, bringing life to otherwise dying small towns in Kansas.

Many have the audacity to bring their families, to stay, sometimes for generations, and to speak the language given to them by the Conquistadores for a while before eventually losing it.

Often, they sing.

And they’re singing now. A family, several families, maybe thirty of them have rented a rowboat on a crystal lake that drowns a hidden forest amid frozen lava flows, an ancient reminder that this part of our country is still considered young by geologists, changing, heaving, convulsing beneath our very feet, reducing the idea of maps, borders, to a silly notion.

Eight of them crowd into the rowboat while the rest wait their turn on shore. The oars squeak as they zigzag, leaving little whirlpools from each kiss of a blade on the water. They draw sideways stares from the other fishermen, but they don’t care.

My daughter is fascinated by their joy. The smiles on the faces of the children. So much more compelling than my insistence on fish that never materialize. She sings along. It’s all one language after all.

And we’re both glad that they’re here.

All of us who prefer reading and writing in the long format rather than in sad little electronic dibs and dabs are staring at an unfolding revolution. I’ve come out on the side of this digital tsunami of change having a positive impact on storytelling.

But others aren’t so sure. The latest post on this subject that has taken my attention is this one by Johann Hari where he says:

The book — the physical paper book — is being circled by a shoal of sharks, with sales down 9 percent this year alone. It’s being chewed by the e-book. It’s being gored by the death of the bookshop and the library. And most importantly, the mental space it occupied is being eroded by the thousand Weapons of Mass Distraction that surround us all.

I’ve been hearing this for years and paying special attention given my own (albeit fading) preoccupation with making the list of top American novelists under 40. I turn 40 this year and other things, which include movies, work, a kid, red wine and fishing, are all conspiring to sap my energy for the sort of literary navel gazing required to write the type of novels I’m interested in. I’ve done the dance with agents and heard their lament all too often. They’re wonderful people, but they’re challenged by the state of the publishing industry. Here’s what one nice agent recently wrote me about a novel manuscript I sent her:

So I think you’re a strong writer – I have to say I enjoyed reading this and was very impressed by your talent which is obvious throughout.  You’ve written a difficult novel but made it engaging and tense, and kept the reader wondering.

But I feel that there are some big problems…at a different time I might have encouraged you to think about a rewrite and to show it to me again, but now it’s such a difficult climate for fiction, that I’m not going to do that.

I used to get that “difficult climate” line a lot.  Maybe it’s a way to let someone down easy…to pass on a manuscript but encourage a <40 writer to keep his chin up and keep at it. Maybe it’s a polite way to say I suck. Or maybe it’s an earnest reflection of the pressure they’re feeling as this era we love so much, that of the long form story in print, goes gently into a good night lit by glowing rectangles in various sizes. If it’s the latter, this tells me that in a previous era I probably could have had a shot at landing that top agent and staking out a modest career in the low stakes world of literary fiction.

But instead I’ve moved on to making documentaries and other distractions, and I’m finding less and less time to write.

But I’m still a reader. If I don’t have at least two books on my nightstand in various stages of completion, I feel a hole in my existence that can’t be filled by either the lesser experiences of social media or the Great American Lobotomy Machine. And being a reader of both long stuff and very old stuff gives me several distinct advantages that make me relavent in a tightening marketplace:

Advantage one: Russian novels and endurance

If you can read a long, rambling Russian novel with a myriad of characters each of whom inexplicably has three or four names, all of which sound similar to those of the other characters, and if you can concentrate long enough, and hard enough, to get through a thousand pages and then be so moved that you weep like a child when it all comes together in the end…then you can pretty much analyze any situation, no matter how dark and tangled, and find your way through to the other side.

People who don’t read Russian novels might reach points in their lives or careers where they feel stalled or impossibly entangled. What you learn from Russian novels is that if you just plod through, if you just focus and turn the page, eventually it will come together. Through sheer brute tenacity, you can reach the conclusion of any given situation.

This has helped me survive any number of challenges, from persisting through numerous creative obsessions to surviving crazy bosses and any number of seemingly hopeless situations of the personal or professional variety.

Persistence pays off. And if the reading of long-format books is truly dying in this age of 140-character interpersonal communication, then I’ve got a secret weapon the next time I face that brick wall and start slamming my forehead against the mortar. I can keep myself sharp through this long slog of life and career, and the fewer folks out there who know this Secret of Dostoyevski, the better the chance that I’ll reach the other side first.

Advantage two: the “creative guy”

I’ve acquired a reputation, not quite honestly, as being something of a creative guy.  I’ve heard it over the years at various corporate and institutional jobs. “Hey, you’re the creative guy, you go figure something out.”

It’s always felt unearned. Mainly because I’m not that creative. My creativity stems largely from stealing things written by dead guys who can’t sue me. That advertising copy? That was a riff on Dylan Thomas or Ovid. That story concept? Straight out of a letter by Flaubert, with imagery from Rilke. The latest commercial script? Heavily influenced by Walt Whitman, whom I read a snippet of daily to help me earn that creative guy label.

Of course, I’m not the only one who “collaborates” with Walt Whitman – the best advertising people all do this, and some aren’t afraid to admit it:

Advantage three: a refuge

Some folks spend small fortunes on psychotherapy or golf, trips to the Far East, yoga classes, you name it, all to achieve some sort of meditative balance in their lives. I’ve got my own distractions that cost me in both time and treasure, not the least of which are wine and fishing. But a paper book is the perfect, portable, inconspicuous, low-cost way to slip into a different plane of existence in order to achieve that distance from the electronic cacophony that is our daily lives.

A novel habit could be the very thing that keeps you sharper than the competition, especially with fewer and fewer folks out there who hone the same required level of concentration that allows you to read something good. If you have an easy, accessible, inexpensive place to retreat for a few hours or moments at a time, then you don’t need that trip to the day spa or those pricey extra eighteen holes to get away. You can save your coins for more important things such as red wine, vitamins, or maybe an MBA degree.

I’m not afraid of books going away. I can go to our local library book sale and load up on really good stuff for five dollars a box. There are so many classic works going back some two thousand years that I have yet to read that, should the practice of writing books cease tomorrow, I could still map out a lifetime of reading.

So I’ll always have this refuge, this bargain retreat that can take me to the Great Russian Steppes or down the Mississippi on a raft with that pesky Huck and my long-time hero and mentor, Jim.

In closing: Seek and Destroy

So in the end, I’m not afraid of the cessation of publishing or the disappearance of reading from mainstream culture. Why? Because it’s always going to be my thing. I frankly don’t care if other people (other than my wife and daughter) continue to read stuff or not. I want my kid to read because it will give her the same advantages that I perceive reading gives me. I don’t have to worry about her, because at seven she is obsessed with collecting fairy books and she begs to hear more chapters of Little House on the Prairie every night. She’ll be just fine when it comes to reading.

If publishers stop publishing and people stop reading, maybe the box loads of books at the library book sale will drop from five bucks to two-fifty.

If publishing and long-format reading collapse, I’ll retain my secret advantages. I can remain the creative guy thanks to Walt Whitman. I can retain my strategy for plowing through difficult situations.

So if long-format books become “my thing,” I’m fine with that. I recall listening to this little known band from the Bay Area when I was a kid. They were called Metallica and they had this album called “Kill ‘em All” that none of the radio stations ever played because it was too raw and angry and poorly produced. This meant that the only way to hear their music was to read about it in some photocopied, pathetic little music zine or to have a friend hand you a copy.

Once you’d discovered Metallica, you became part of an underground movement, a sort of greasy, black tee-shirted clan of socially awkward individuals who possessed this power of frothing, addictive music that they only shared with others of their kind.

To connect with this clan, all you had to do was hum, in a nasal falsetto, the opening bars of “Seek and Destroy” and you’re fellow clansmen would begin banging their heads: “bwananaa, bum bwananaa, bum bum bum bum bum bwanahh!” You then knew that you could safely talk about music and anarchy with them.

Later on, when Metallica’s fame grew and and you could find them in records stores and on the radio and in music videos, our desperately awkward clan lost our secret muse. When the band ceased to be underground, they ceased to interest us. When they stopped eating sandwiches of stale Wonder bread smeared with stolen ketchup packets form fast food chains, their mystique diminished. They were now “lame.” By virtue of earning a living, they had “sold out.” We had to look elsewhere because we now shared the secret with the general populace, and that wouldn’t do. It wouldn’t do at all.

So if books go underground…if they become the purview of a few strange individuals sitting around staring at bleached pulp for hours on end, I will not be afraid nor saddened. Instead, I’ll know who I’ll be safe to sit next to on a bus when I don’t feel like talking – someone engrossed in a book is less likely to start some inane conversation. I’ll know who I can trust. I know who I can safely talk to without being bored to tears. I know what I’ll be able to look for on park benches or in airport lobbies to find others of my kind.

If books finally begin to disappear from mainstream culture, maybe I’ll find my tribe again.

Flushed with the victory of actually having completed something somewhat coherent after 140,000 words, I arrived upon an answer to his question: “The key,” I said, “is learning how to write bad stuff. Anyone can write the good stuff…the shit that flies across the screen when you’re accosted by the muse of literary pretension. But writing the bad stuff is hard. That’s the stuff you have to cut later, or rewrite. Or maybe you even get lucky and it turns out to be not as bad as you thought even though it was painful as hell to get down.”

Writers, even unsuccessful ones, are famous for aphorisms.

But I still think that’s largely true. Though I’m also now convinced that I don’t have the first clue about how to write fiction or a novel. I’ve got a couple that I’ve finished and like well enough, but the fact that they still exist solely as doublespaced, Times New Roman manuscripts gives me a clue to what the marketplace thinks of my literary greatness.

But to finish a novel, you do have to learn to write the bad stuff. Or at least write through the bad stuff. Take tonight, for example. Two hours ago I decided I’d sit down and write 600 words on this new project I’m trying to get through. It started as a short story, turned into a screenplay and now seems to want to be a novel. So I’ve given myself a goal of 600 words per day, good or bad, so that I’ll have a draft to look at in July to see if the first stab is good, bad or ugly.

But then I started writing and became completely dejected. The whole project fell into question. I reread some other passages, which seemed uninspired and vapid. I was certain that I’d never be able to get 600 words…even 600 bad ones.

But I started typing. The first two sentences took me 15 minutes.  But then I found and followed an image of a woman pulling radishes from a garden bed made from old tractor tires. And the below passage is the result. I can’t say if it’s good or not, or if it will even wind up in the finished piece. But it’s 1,200 words long and it doesn’t make me cringe.

I don’t know any secrets to writing. But I’m pretty convinced that finishing anything of length requires you to sit down and beat your head against the wall and write a whole lot of stuff you’re convinced is absolutely lousy. If you have the discipline to do that, you won’t have a problem hanging on long enough to type “The End.”

WERE WE EVER HAPPY? I hold a vague recollection, something so distant and faded that it might be a memory of a memory. Or maybe it was even something I’d created in a dream. But it’s there, a warm bright moment in the light of a spring afternoon. For an instant we were happy: my father, my mother and I.

I was four. It was our second year on the old Richter farm, which had stood for a long while as overgrown pasture and blackberry thickets. My old man had leased the two hundred acre property adjacent to my grandmother’s farm. It was his bid to make a go of it on his own, and he’d planted corn and beans and then sweet sorghum on the poorer ground for silage and with the intent of making molasses to sell at the farmers market in town. My grandma had been selling off acreage to pay the medical bills from the kidney failure that had consumed and killed my granddad the year before. My dad wanted to leave her free to do what she needed to with her land.

He liked having his own place even if everyone said nothing would come of it. The soil was poor I think we were happy enough there. My mother had wallpapered the kitchen and bedrooms with money she earned cutting hair. She had a stool on the old shade porch, and women would bring their boys from town to sit on it while Ma ran the clippers over their skulls. She charged two dollars less than the barber shop in town for pretty much the same result.

She had planted winter beds in old tractor tires, and they were already lush with spring greens, beats and even a few strawberries. I remember the day clearly. It was late morning and I was helping with the garden, more likely just pushing dirt around, when I noticed the absence of the sound of the tractor running in the back fields for the first time in weeks.

I spotted my dad by the well spigot near the barn, and he was washing the dirt off his forearms and splashing the back of his neck. Ma looked up from the bundle of vegetables collected on the lap of her garden dress. She smiled with surprise.

“Let’s fix a lunch and go to the creek,” he said. He wasn’t quite smiling. I couldn’t say that I’d ever seen him smile in earnest. But there was a light in his eyes. He took off his cap and wiped his brow.

Ma sliced radishes and cheese and rye bread. She poured some cream in an old jelly jar and then filled the balance of it with strawberries. She wrapped slices of deer sausage from a March doe in waxed paper and bundled all of it in a bandana.

Dad brought along a heavy wool Navy blanket and a couple of cane poles, and we walked a path he kept mowed short enough that we didn’t have to work about ticks. It took us all the way to the back of the farm where there was a gate that let out on a stone county road, more of a twin-track that was used by the local farmers. We climbed up past my grandmother’s place and then down into a draw near the base of Carson’s Ridge where Bonne Femme Creek still ran clear and swift, eddies coiling into long, deep, rocky pools.

We found a grassy spot on the bank of our favorite pool, and I can remember the chicory and blue-eyed grass giving a splash of color.  Ma found a warm, sunny spot near the rusted metal gates of an old family cemetery. I don’t know if anyone knew who those old headstones belonged to, maybe the very first family to farm this country after it had only been Osage land. The names were weathered off and weeds grew up inside the iron fence.

We ate the strawberries and cream first. Ma gave us each a spoon, but they left most of it for me. We ate sausage and sliced radishes on the rye bread and then dad laid back on the blanket and began to snore softly within moments. I stared at his brow and watched it twitch as a bee hovered close.

Ma and I took up the poles and dug for worms in the soft bank with driftwood. We cast bobbers into the pool and watched the sunfish expertly remove our worms, red and white floats dancing in the riffle and then gliding even once they’d removed their quarry. We didn’t catch anything. We didn’t speak. We just sat on the banks and smelled the turned earth and the rich, sweet green of adolescent spring leaves and the early wildflowers. It was nice because there were no hard words, no impatient questions from my old man or vacant responses from Ma. Even as a small child I could read there was little they cared for in one another.  But this day none of that showed.

We came back to the blanket and Dad was cutting on a walking stick, notching lines on one end for the handle, scraping off bark. I hoped that he was making it for me, but I suspected that he wasn’t. Maybe he was just filling time, and he’d leave it when we packed to go, in which case it would be mine to take. Greed exists in the most basic form in children.

Ma lay down on the thick, coarse wool and Dad laid down next to her on his side, his head propped by one elbow, his chin in his palm. They weren’t touching.

At first I thought he might be staring at her hair as it was stirred by the balmy spring breeze, but then I realized that he was staring at the old family grave plot. He looked for a long time, and then I remembered that he sat up suddenly and shaded his eyes, staring into the tall grass between the weathered old markers.

“What is it?” Ma asked, and he just shook his head and lay back down, glancing sideways into the cool, tall grass as he did so.

That’s when I heard a plop and I rushed to a bank to see a huge alligator snapping turtle scoot into the depths of the pool. I watched the trail he’d made dragging his thick tail across the mud of the bank. When I got back Ma and Dad were wordlessly packing up the picnic. Ma smiled and hummed to herself and dad glanced at his watch and then the sun to see how much time he had left for tractor work.

I remember hearing a crow caw as we left the creek bank.  “That was nice,” Ma said later as we crossed our property. She reached out absently and brushed the back of my neck. There was a gentleness underneath her calluses, and a strength in her fingers, and it was the kind of touch that makes a boy know that there is good things in the world.

That was the only time I figure all three of us were happy. Even my old man. The following spring the banks of Bonne Femme would flood the bottom ground well into planting season so that a few neighbors wouldn’t even get their corn in. By August, Ma would be dead. And a year after, my old man would walk past me into the kitchen to take down the twenty-gauge he kept on the ledge above the Frigidaire.

Here I am back in my hometown of Chicago, slouching toward the birth of the new year, the year in which I’ll hit the big four-oh. Maybe it’s too soon to start in with the hand-wringing that usually accompanies the reaching of the rough middle point of one’s journey across this great green and blue rock. But navel gazing is a specialty of us writer-types, especially those of us educated by the MFA writing program industry.

Midlife crises are nothing new to me. I’ve been having them on and off since my teens when a sudden growth spurt ended my unlikely gymnastics career. I then turned to tennis, the Chicago Board of Options Exchange, a stint with a rock band, a pair of failed attempts at the Foreign Service Exam, three stabs over a fifteen year period at writing a Great American Novel, a solid near miss at writing for the screen and my current preoccupation with making a (low-budget) feature film of some sort.

Most of these endeavors have involved storytelling of one form or another. Partner that with my career in public relations and institutional communications, and it involves a whole lot of fiction. In short: bullshit. This penchant for stories arises mainly from a hell of a lot of movies and books over the years. I love both of these forms, and not a few of them have changed the course of my life as I’ve struck out in a new direction dragging my wife and kid along as I go. Books are dangerous and powerful things. Sometimes. Other times they put you to sleep. Often, at their best, they just make you smile and lay the pages in your lap, closing your eyes and savoring the funny way they make your brain feel.

Storytelling is an art and a craft and a compulsion. Some people do it really, really well. Some are just pretty good. Most suck at it. I haven’t quite figured out where I fit on that spectrum. What I do know, though, is that I’ve run out of roughly half of the time endowed to me to find out. And now the chances will grow slimmer with each passing minute. This doesn’t frighten or frustrate me that much. Sure I sense the sand slipping through the hourglass. But I’m also starting to approach an acceptance of the fact that I may never really know.

As a writer, I’ve been good enough to show well in a contest here or there. Outside my day job, I’ve earned a grand total of less than five thousand dollars for my scribblings. Not bad, actually. How many people have hobbies that pay them back? How many people approach, say, the watching of television like a part-time job? Instead, I tell stories. Sometimes people read them. Sometimes they even pay me for them.

Add to that a few plane tickets to LA, and one dinner in particular in Santa Monica that I recall where a producer asked me, without irony, who I’d like to play the lead role in the film of a screenplay I’d written. “What about Leonardo DiCaprio?” I asked. The producer frowned. I thought he might laugh. But he didn’t. He was thinking. “No,” he said, “don’t think we could get him. Who else?”

That film didn’t get produced. Neither did the next half dozen scripts I wrote outside of one short film, which I made myself with the help of friends. That turned out to be one of the more exhilarating storytelling experiences in this long, ambling and not very lucrative part-time career.

And while all of this other stuff was going on, this reading and writing and filmmaking, etc, I’ve wound up having a fairly rewarding actual career in another aspect of the bullshit biz. I’ve clawed my way up to middle management in a PR shop for a state institution, which sounds quite horrid but actually isn’t. I have no problems punching a clock, growing up as I did in a union household. My old man counted money in a dingy, smoky vault below crooked horse tracks under the direction of a state racing commission and various and occasionally nefarious wealthy families. For fun he golfs, dotes on a fancy car and for many years cared for and operated a speedboat, treating a host of family and friends to lake holidays over the years.

Instead of speedboating, I make up stories in my spare time. Instead of planning the union picnic, I make super low-budget movies. My endeavors may be a tad Quixotic compared to my father’s and his race track friends’, but they’re no less enjoyable.

I don’t want to give the actual, paying job short shrift. I’ve had some nice rewards, not the least of which being health benefits and a steady paycheck that over the years has enabled world travel and helped with the acquisition of not a few nice bottles of wine. We sent our daughter to a solid private preschool. Cutting corners means forgoing a vacation rental in favor of tent  camping or putting off buying a new lens for my camera for a month or two. We’re not rich. We’ll never be rich. But, right now, anyway, we’re not hurting.

And building websites and helping put together marketing campaigns online has brought some creative satisfaction and a bit of recognition. It amuses me that I get to travel around the country and give presentations to folks about some of the things I do on a job I never expected or wanted in the first place. That’s not to say I don’t appreciate or enjoy said job. It’s just that I always thought I’d be doing something else. Like cashing checks from New York publishers or Los Angeles producers.

But I’ve learned that this isn’t really how the world works. Maybe for some people, but not for the vast majority. As I slouch toward forty, I’m realizing that this kind of sucks, but then it’s also not really that bad. If I could have my choice of a career, I’d be sitting in a book-stuffed cabin near Sisters, Oregon with a view of the three volcanic peaks, hacking away at a vintage typewriter, amassing pages, which I’d slip into an envelope and send to an agent. Every so often, a check would come in the mail. I’d occasionally get up to split wood and feed the fireplace. I’d pick my daughter up from school and then fix dinner for the family. In the evenings we’d watch Francis Ford Coppola movies or I’d actually have time to read the New Yorker weekly. On weekends I’d fish for trout or sketch landscapes. Maybe I’d take photographs of flowers with a macro lens.

But that’s not how it works. Maybe reaching forty means that you begin to accept and realize what’s fantasy and what’s not. Right now my goals are less ambitious than the National Book Awards or the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. I’d like to get a little nicer house so that we can have guests without feeling cramped. I’d like a six-burner stove and more time to cook. I’d like to be a little less stressed at work and have a little more time to engage in bullshit artistry: I’d like to take a shot at another novel or script. Maybe one will be something I’m really, really pleased with, whether or not it’s ever published or produced. I want to fish more, go backpacking with my daughter, and increase the number of times per year that my wife and I take in dinner and a show.

All of these goals seem reasonable. I even hope to accomplish one or two of them in 2011. And the rest should be easily attainable sometime over the next forty years.

But let’s leave the survival of the paper book alone, and ask the more important question: Will writers be able to make a living and continue writing in the digital era?

Ah…here we are. The crux of the issue for Mr. Morrison and all writers of his ilk who share this lament. Nevermind the actual books…let’s instead worry about how writers (like, perhaps, Mr. Morrison himself) will be able to cash in in this era of the free and ubiquitous. Or, to put it bluntly,why the fuck would I read Mr. Morrison’s work when I can download–say–Mark Twain for free? Great question.

Mr. Morrison goes on in that infuriating article to mourn “The Retreat of Advances” and other such hardships that novelists are having to endure these days. Ah, the fat advance. Morrison insists that a huge advance is actually the key to great literature (and to think I’d always thought it was those muses):

To ask whether International Man Booker prizewinner Philip Roth could have written 24 novels and the award-winning American trilogy without advances is like asking if Michelangelo could have painted the Sistine Chapel without the patronage of Pope Julius II. The economic framework that supports artists is as important as the art itself; if you remove one from the other then things fall apart.

I like Philip Roth as much as the next guy, but he’s been retreading the rather narrow, angst-ridden, semi-autobiographical streets of Newark, NJ in his Nathan Zuckerman novels for years. Have these advances really inspired Roth to greatness? Or have they just prolonged his navel-gazing? To compare Roth to Michelangelo is…well…kind of a stretch. And then to insist that the main reason that such fine Rothian literature gets produced is due to the corporate publishing model–with it’s Victorian roots and gaggles of agents, editors and mid-level marketing execs cashing in at every stop in the process between author and reader–is beyond silly.

I’m tired of hearing the dire refrain. I’m actually inspired by the new possibilities in storytelling. But for folks like Morrison, it all boils down to this: “If I don’t get paid to write my semi-autobiographical bourgeois ’literature,’ and if…God forbid…I have to get a real job, the world as we know it will begin to crumble!” Writers, literary writers especially, think they deserve to receive checks in the mail for what they do. Which is horseshit.

I’m not saying that just because I’m a working stiff writer with very modest publishing credentials. The main reason I find Morrison’s sentiment pathetic is due to my recent foray into independent filmmaking. If anything, it’s a more demanding pursuit in terms of persistence, blood, sweat and treasure than writing. And I’ve met folks who have mortgaged their houses, sacrificed marriages, given up careers and moved in with their mothers at the age of forty…all for the sake of creating their art. And I’m not talking about pulphouse B-movies…those genre films actually have a chance at making a little money. I’m talking about very excellent, thoughtful, well-crafted and intelligent independent features and documentaries.

There’s very little money in filmmaking. The old saw is, “If you want to make a small fortune in the film business, start with a large one.” I see people with leaky roofs and trashy cars maxing out their credit cards to buy camera gear or to pay for catering to feed volunteer actors. I’ve borrowed money from friends and family. I’ve begged for cash. It makes me sick to slip around with my hand out, expecting folks who don’t have much money to begin with to kick in for my project so I can play around with a camera. But in film, if you want to finish a project, that’s what you have to do. Plenty of months go by when I invest in a film before I make that deposit into my kid’s college fund. I’ve managed to (mostly) avoid the credit card debt with plagues so many indie film folks. But I’ve kicked quite a few chips into the kitty over the years. Writers actually have it easy: their art costs them nothing to make. Zero! Zilch!

Writers actually have it easy: their art costs them nothing to make. Zero! Zilch!

Sure, there are film folks in LA getting rich. Many of them even make fantastic movies. But if there is a genre in film that compares with great literature of the ages, it’s that independent genre that is fueled by espresso, tips from waiting tables and maxed out credit cards. Folks give blood to make moves. Robert Rodriguez famously sold his body to science to finance his first film.

So after hearing a jackass like Morrison whine about how all those who love books are duty bound to defend the old publishing model, I’m ready to relinquish the title of “writer.”  I’ll still write scripts. Maybe even another novel or two. I’ll most likely end up giving them all away, or in the case of a narrative film, end up investing my retirement fund in making it happen. And instead persisting to carry the  whining title of “writer,” I’ll pick up the title of “filmmaker” where I’ll be among blue collar folks who are willing to roll up their sleeves and make sacrifices for their art, to beg money off of family or to work a real job to make ends meet, putting together projects nights, weekends or during two week vacations from work.

And if writers like Morrison and Roth truly require corporate patronage to be inspired to create great work, and if the absence of the fat advance renders them literarily impotent, then I just have to say “good riddance.” Go sulk. Quit writing. Somebody else will be willing to step up and write something solid. Or I can always go back to Mark Twain.

Just a word of caution, though. If you quit writing, or if those advance checks stop rolling in, you may find you have to go out and get a real job. And if you can write HTML code or solid advertising copy, and if you’re willing to bust your ass while you’re on the clock, then you’re even welcome to come apply where I work. And, if you want, you can come out to a shoot some weekend and help by holding a boom mic. I might even feed you if you do.

It’s been at least ten years since I first started thinking seriously about eBooks and getting excited about the idea.  I had a Palm Pilot for work, and the display was poor and the Internet connection was horrible. But I loved the idea of carrying an entire library in my pocket. Still, I never even purchased the first book. The Palm Pilot is probably in some museum right now. Maybe the Gutenberg Museum we recently visited in Mainz, Germany.

Well, it’s taken me ten years to finally give it a try. What I needed was the right device and a strong reason to jump in. I bought an iPhone a couple years ago. But still, I didn’t download the Kindle app and a book until  my friend Daren Dean released his amazing novel, Far Beyond the Pale, on Amazon. I downloaded the app and fired up the book, and now I’m thoroughly enjoying both Daren’s excellent writing and the experience of reading a novel electronically.

Readwriteweb recently gave five reasons why eBooks are better than their paper ancestors.Though they highlight some amazing features of eBooks that aren’t available in the dead tree format, I wouldn’t go so far as saying this makes them superior. There’s still nothing quite like the smell of a fresh (or old and dusty) book, or the feel of pulp in your hands. There’s a sensory pleasure in reading a paper book that can’t be replicated digitally.

But the actual act reading, of experiencing words, even on the iPhone’s small screen, is just as engaging as reading on paper. You can make notes, highlight, save your spot. The iPhone allows you to flip pages with your thumb, adding a new level of touch to the experience that pressing a button can’t give you. The digital annotation tools are more efficient than the analog system of sticky notes, highlighters, bent corners and margin scrawls (albeit aesthetically less pleasing). The price is also fantastic. Daren is self-published, but I was able to buy his novel at a price on Kindle that allowed him a better profit margin (per copy) than if he’d connected with a traditional publisher.

Some writers and book lovers may think that the advent of eBooks is a sad day for novels, words and books in general. I think that’s pessimistic horse shit.

There’s also something nice about the short page length on an iPhone…it gives you the feeling of headlong progress (through the 4,000+ pages that Daren’s novel reaches in this format). I thought I’d need time to adjust to thousands of micropages compared to the traditional200-400 page length of a novel, but it’s been no problem at all. In fact, I appreciate being able to flip a page or two between giving my kid a bath or waiting for her to brush her teeth. It seems easier to dip in and out of a novel than reading a fraction of a longer, standard-length page.

Some writers and book lovers may think that the advent of viable eBook platforms is a sad day for novels, words and books in general. I think that’s pessimistic horse shit. eBooks may just be what saves the novel form in this digital age. The new platform introduces the novel experience to people who are used to consuming all of their information on a mobile device and wouldn’t otherwise think to read something of that length. It saves trees. It allows self-published authors to reach a global audience in minutes. It enhances the opportunity to deepen the novel experience with, say, video of the author reading or social highlighting and notes that give you an instant book discussion group. The future of the book-length manuscript would be far more precarious if they didn’t translate so smoothly to the Kindle, iPhone and iPad.

And it’s silly to think that paper books will die as a result of the growing popularity of eBooks. We all now have keyboards and mobile devices that shoot video and record audio. People write blogs and online diaries and send volumes of digitally composed email. But personal journals are as popular as ever. Moleskine notebooks are on sale everywhere. I see them in every coffee shop in Oregon, but I also recently returned from Germany and Italy, and they’re all over Europe as well. Every corner in Florence seemed to have a fine stationary shop, where Moleskines were the cheap option, and antique leather notebooks fetched ridiculous prices. There’s still a place for the handwritten word five hundred years after Gutenberg. People will always read paper books as well.

While we were in Germany, we stopped at  the Gutenberg Museum. My daughter joined her cousins in making prints in the museum’s hands-on print shop. She was thrilled by the tactile, mechanical experience of creating art in a method not unlike Gutenberg used when he printed his first Bible page a half millennium ago. This experience could never be replicated digitally. The art hanging on the walls of the print shop was innovative, and had a warm, comfortable feeling. Prints will be decorating walls for as long as I’m alive. Gutenberg’s invention brought the Bible and a host of other materials to the hands of people who didn’t have access to them before. He created a world of readers, expanding the simple practice of reading to the great unwashed. eBooks have the potential of bringing novels and book-length manuscripts forward, not only reaching people who already read them, but even introducing them to folks who never would have thought to pick up a manuscript on their own before.

So for writers and serious readers, there’s nothing to fear from eBooks. Bookstores will still exist. Some will flourish, and some will close. But books and novel manuscripts will persist. Writers like Daren Dean will be able to share their stories with friends on the other side of the country, and hopefully even reach a wider audience. Far Beyond the Pale is a compelling novel with an engaging voice. It’s a little raw, but it’s better than a lot of the pap that I’ve bought from traditional publishers in the past year. It also has a feeling of personal authenticity that other novels I’ve read recently. Maybe it’s because I know Daren, or maybe it’s because the digital age is allowing novelists to engage readers without the filter of big corporate publishers.

Daren is an amazing writer who surrounds his readers with voice-driven prose and rich, tactile imagery that comes through just as well on screen as it does on paper. And even traditional publishers and agents have been telling him for years that he’s an amazing writer, though, “the market is just too tough right now.” But today he’s now able to reach the audience he deserves.

Gutenberg would be pleased.

Zusak's "The Book Thief" sparkles with gems

I just finished The Book Thief by Markus Zusak, which was a runaway success a few years back that I somehow missed. But then I’ve always been a few steps out of tune with pop culture.

It was recommended to me by my sister, who has outstanding taste in books despite being a Republican. We forget that there are intelligent conservatives, or at least I do. Such individuals are no less misguided for possessing thoughtful qualities. But then there also are plenty of people who vote Democratic who are complete assholes. No general truths are absolute. They’re just generally true.

So back to Mr. Zusak and his wonderful book. The New York Times is credited with saying that, “it’s the kind of book that can be LIFE CHANGING (sic).” I wouldn’t go that far. But it’s pretty friggin’ good.

It’s set in Nazi Germany during the war, and it’s about an orphaned, illiterate little girl taken in by a foster family on the shady side of Munich. The family looks to be a horrorshow: a passive, if good natured husband and a terror of a foster mother with a foul tongue and a penchant for corporal punishment. Little Liesel Meminger seems to be in for a rough ride. I read with extra interest as my own mother was a child of four during the Allied bombing raids over Berlin. Liesel’s only a few years older. And I couldn’t help but think of my mothers stories all during this novel.

In a kind reversal, Liesel’s gruff little foster family is hardly Dickensian. Instead, they turn out to be surprisingly human in a world of Nazis. They hide a Jewish man in their basement, for example, at time when neighbors will readily turn you into the Gestapo. Papa risks a beating to give a crust of bread to a man being marched to a concentration camp. He teaches Liesel to read, which leads to the title character’s book thievery, giving this novel it’s title. And Mama’s capacity for love proves to be as large as her off-color vocabulary and as quick as the back of her hand.

With Allied bombs turning German civilians into hamburger, and columns of half-starved Jews marched through Liesel’s neighborhood on their way to Dachau, The Book Thief is brutal and tough, especially for a young adult novel. But then it’s probably the type of thing young adults should read if they are to tackle such a big subject.

The pages are replete with magic and dazzling characters. Like Liesel’s neighbor and boyish crush, Rudy Steiner, a wiry pre-teen who likes to sneak out of the house at night and paint himself black and run laps at the local track to emulate his hero, Jesse Owens, the man who rose from his own country’s segregation to travel to Berlin and disprove Hitler’s theory of racial superiority. Liesel’s first kiss with young Rudy will conjure a few tears if you have any sort of a heart. I’ll admit to being a little choked up at the end of this novel, and not a little sad that it was over.

Probably most magical element in this book is it’s narrator, who is none other than Death himself, Harvester of Souls. And Death certainly has his hands full during the Holocaust and WWII. In a brilliant stroke, Zusak makes Death the most thoughtful and “human” presence, whose grim work is undertaken (pun!) with such grace and beauty that one can only wish the real Grim Reaper has such compassion. For example, Mr. D says of this key character’s soul, as he carries it off:

This one was sent out by the breath of an accordion, the odd taste of champagne in summer, and the art of promise-keeping. He lay in my arms and rested.

The language is subtle, stylish and beautiful. There are many asides and interjections by Death made in bold type, little sonnets of wit and bittersweetness that give this long book a clever, clipped pace. When the book ended, I didn’t want it to be over. Zusak said, “I like the idea that every page in every book can have a gem on it.” He sure as hell writes as if he believes that. This book sparkles and glitters.

Four stars, three and a half thumbs up. It’s great to know that this whole novel writing thing is alive and well.

She strains cold air through her teeth, not quite a grin, and the blown sand that crusts her lashes and snakes over her receding footprints scours this hard child’s shell. Inside she’s all mush and hurt, but that shell, man, it’s something. You could break bottles on it.

She’s never before seen the sunset or the ocean, and this sudden confluence has her on a high. She trusts the dog and the reckless, headlong strides and the taste of the salt air, gulps of crab rot, kelp and bird shit.

She doesn’t understand her crimes, even less so the sentence, but the pounding of her feet, the tiny splash of each stride on the wet sand…this feels very real and solid to her.

Her brown hair is a ribbon, a salt-sticky pennant streaming behind her. The dog’s tongue lolls and flaps, and there are three princesses and sequins stitched into her garage sale sweatshirt.

She doesn’t know that regular children aren’t in the habit of screaming themselves to sleep at night, and they will assert their rights with tooth and claw only at their peril. Punishment doesn’t really work on her. “Is that all you got,” she grins back over her shoulder.

She also doesn’t know that the Labrador, who gallops ahead of her, tugging on the leash, aware only of a gull in the distance and this strange little creature in tow who is indulging her penchant for headlong flight, has only this morning chewed the armrest off of the sofa and that she shits regularly on an heirloom throw rug, the oblivious creature persisting only through the owner’s sense of duty.

She glances back only briefly to see her latest mother and the dog’s owner both waving and cupping their hands to their mouths to shout into a wind that sucks the voice out of their words before they even cross their lips. Then the Labrador snaps the leash and puts her head down to gallop with redoubled stride, as if to say, “come on, kid, now’s our chance.”

She squeezes her eyes shut and trusts the leash and the yellow plug of fur and muscle at the other end, not heeding the voices she can no longer hear, not even sensing that the big people far behind her are, without even admitting it to themselves, both hoping that these two girls just keep on running.

Any reader who is also a writer understands that questions will rattle in your head as you wend your way through a work of fiction. Unlike regular readers, you can’t simply be subsumed by story, sinking into the world that the author has labored to create. Like a retired engineer you have to kick the tires, lift up the hood, puzzle through how this contraption was put together.

This is part two of a Q&A with J. Adams Oaks, the author of the hot new YA novel Why I Fight. The great thing about knowing writers, especially writers as talented as J. Adams Oaks, is that those questions need not merely echo around in my head. I can kick them over to Jeff and get some actual answers and insight into the process he went through in creating his amazing book. So let’s lift up the hood…

Your novel has one of the most distinct and unique narrators I can recall. As soon as I finished “Why I Fight” I went back and read your story “Ash Butterflies” in Hair Trigger 21. Two things struck me.  First, it’s amazing how the promise of this novel is contained in that story: the voice, the characters, your rich attention to detail.

But Wyatt’s voice in the novel has also grown since that early story…his wide-eyed, childish innocence has been colored by an edge of street smarts. He’s developed quirks and narrative traits that bring him to life. What happened after the publication of that story? What elements led to the evolution of Wyatt’s narrative voice?

First, thanks for the kinds words. I do think that Wyatt Reaves was much more naive back then, because “Ash Butterflies” was his very first incarnation and it was really that scrawny scared 12 and 1/2 year old sitting in his parents house alone for days on end telling that initial story. It’s that voice, more than anything, that made me want to carry the story forward. I couldn’t get his voice out of my head and I couldn’t help but wonder who these people were around him.

So I listened. The thing is that his story moved forward and he grew, so his voice aged and honestly, innocence can last only so long and then it gets really annoying, you know like a character in a Disney cartoon. So once I realized where Wyatt was going, I had to go back and revise his understand of his situation and the story. My amazing mentor, advisor and friend, Randy Albers, Chair of the Fiction Department at Columbia College and I had long discussions as to how distant Wyatt was from the telling. Randy encouraged me to see it from a 40-year-old Wyatt’s eye, but I just couldn’t hear that person. I couldn’t even imagine him that far into the future, and honestly I didn’t know if he even made it that far. So we hear it from a nearly 18 year old, who thinks he understands the world a bit, but really is only starting to see it. That’s what makes me so excited for him, he’s moving toward a beginning.

The story “Ash Butterflies” has become the emotional climactic scene of “Why I Fight.” All of the core elements are there, though the version that appears in the novel is leaner and more headlong.

Okay, well, I always saw the short story as the beginning of the Wyatt’s adventure, because most of it is told fairly chronologically. But, as I started to work with my phenomenal editor Richard Jackson on the 2nd and 3rd drafts, the story really became this close-up, intimate telling with Wyatt next to you on a bus talking to you just inches away. And because Wyatt was talking to you, a stranger, my editor asked me, “Would you tell your most shameful secret to someone you’d just sat down next to?” And he was right, there was no way he’d admit to what he’d done; he’d have to really sink in and feel comfortable before he could admit the truth.

Why I Fight

Did you do this much trimming throughout the book during the editorial process? Were there any moments that you hated to give up?

That novel was as big as 350 pages and as trim as 175. I wrote 5 complete new versions over the years. Each was this amazing learning experience that had a specific reason it needed to exist, so there was also expanding and removing and adding back in and shuffling of chapters and reshuffling and on and on. It was intense and insane, but I’m a much better writer for it.

I did hate giving one chapter that had Wyatt and Clark, his only friend, spending time together, but my editor said if it didn’t have a purpose other than them spending time together, it needed to go. I loved it. Sure, it did some stuff, but I couldn’t figure out why I needed it, so it’s gone (of course, nothing is truly gone with computer now, so I’ll tuck it away for another day…). But for the record, I L-O-V-E editing and trimming. I love to write a bunch of STUFF and then, like a puzzle, try to figure out how the words can be there best.

The novel has an urgent, headlong pace. It’s hard to put down. This is helped along by the structure, particularly the short chapters, averaging 5 pages. When in the process did you arrive at this structure? What were the advantages of breaking the story down in this fashion?

Honestly, it was done in the last draft of the book and it was after Richard Jackson and I had discussed how young adults would see the book. He mentioned shorter chapters are better for young readers to feel a sense of accomplishment as they turn the page.

I remembered back to my childhood and that feeling of reading before bed and thinking, “I’ll read through this chapter and then I’ll sleep.” Or I’d check to see how much further I had to go. But it also serves the purpose of keep that pace that Wyatt is keeping and keeping anecdotal as it would be in a longer conversation. Plus I think it’s good for my adult friends who read it on the L here in Chicago and can read a couple chapters on the way to work!

How did you arrive at the title?

Oh, the title… Hmmm… Okay, so the original title for years was “Shreds” which came from the image of Wyatt tearing up comic strips and burning them, but obviously referred to the larger shreds of Wyatt’s life. Once the book evolved into this intensely intimate first-person narrative, wise Mr. Jackson asked me a simple question that would stump me for A VERY LONG TIME. He asked me, “Don’t you think that Wyatt deserves to title his own life?”

Well, damn it. How could I say no to that. But what would you name your own life, you know? That’s not as easy as if sounds. And certainly not for a 17 year old. So, I brainstormed and brainstormed and emailed them to my editor. Often times, I’d come home from a night out drinking, and I’d sit down at my computer and make a list of 10 or 20 that I’d shoot off to Richard, he’d reply in the morning with the two or three he thought were okay, but not quite right, we were getting there, keep going, he’d tell me. And somehow, maybe with the bourbon helping the creative flow, WHY I FIGHT was in one of panoply of lists. FINALLY! It felt right. It sounded proper. I think Wyatt would like it, you know?

One of the many vivid, visceral scenes in the book has Wyatt killing and cleaning fish at Spade’s insistence. I can still recall a version of this scene that your read in class more than ten years ago. Was that always a part of this novel? If not, when did you realize that it was part of something bigger?

No, that was always part of the book. And yes it started in that class, me trying to understand Wyatt and Uncle Spade’s relationship. It always felt very defining for the two of them.

There are so many emotionally charged moments in the book, like Spade’s confrontation with Lynnesha, or when Wyatt grabs Clark by the throat. Was there any scene that was particularly challenging to write or especially draining for you as the writer?

Without giving away the scene with Lynnesha and Spade finally confronting each other, I’ll say that it was one of the most difficult, because as I got into it, I kept saying to myself, “I don’t want this to happen… Is this really happening? What’s going on?” and it had to happen. It was the story telling me what it needed. The violence was overwhelming to me.

So many other people are upset by the killing of fish and tadpoles, but man that confrontation gets me every time! Wyatt and Clark having it out, was actually taken out of the book and then added back into a much later draft. I relished writing it, not for the violence by any means, but for the moment Wyatt is really claiming how he feels and standing in it so fully. I love imagining him standing in the woods, clenching giant fists as the rain trails off them, his brow furrowed. That’s like a movie scene for me!

This is a road novel that carries Wyatt and Spade across the country. Did you hit the road while you were working on this book? How did you capture the sights and smells of the state fairs, the salvage yards and the seedy motels?

I didn’t do much road-tripping while writing the book, but I did take one specific vacation before my last semester of grad school; I had a week off, rented a car and drove only rural routes and back roads all the way to Boulder, Colorado and back. I journalled a lot along the way.

Most of the book was actually written while I lived in Denver. Two of my closest friends, Claire Fallon and Steve Kalinosky, were kind enough to let me live with them for free as long as I wrote every day, so I committed to 4 hours daily. And Colorado was so foreign to me as a midwesterner that it certainly helped me truly pay attention to The Road. I should also say that my parents are academics, so we all had summers off and our vacations were in the family station wagon seeing as much of the U.S. as possible. Thought I didn’t really appreciate that education until I was much older.

The whole novel is framed as Wyatt spilling his guts to a stranger on a bus, with the reader standing in for the stranger. How did this device come about? You can truly hear Wyatt’s voice in your head. Did this structure help to develop that voice?

After Richard Jackson decided to work with me on the book, he asked me a question that I’m sure you and I were asked frequently in classes at Columbia: “Who is Wyatt talking to?”  I answered quite flippantly, trying to dismiss this extremely important question, I said, “He’s talking to a stranger on a bus.” Dick answered, “Well, if that’s so, you haven’t written that book.”

We talked about what that situation would really contain: only enough information during a bus ride, a public conversation, a censorship of language, etc. So I worked on an entire draft considering what Wyatt was saying to this “stranger.” Eventually, in later drafts that stranger became the reader. And in the second to last draft, Dick asked me read the entire book out loud to myself, and if I couldn’t say it then it wasn’t working, if it didn’t fit in my mouth then I had to consider whether it needed to stay. It was amazing to read the whole thing over a couple days. It made me hear those flowery sentences that were the author or the narrator over pouring Wyatt’s voice. It made that voice really come first.

The entire novel is linear except for the fire scene near the end…why did you decide to jump back in time right at that point of the story?

I think I accidentally answered this earlier. It felt like Wyatt just couldn’t admit to what he’d done until he felt comfortable with the listener, the stranger.

Nana, with all of her quirks and eccentricities, is one of the colorful characters that sparkles in this story. How did she come to play such an important role? And where did the crates of glass come from? How did you decide to give Wyatt his ever-present piece of “Nana glass” to hold on to?

Nana was one of the first characters developed in grad school after I’d written “Ash Butterflies.” I’m not sure what exercise we were doing in class, but she really came to life pushing that grandfather clock, surrounded by cats and crates. I wasn’t sure what was in the crates at first, but once I saw the glass, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Why did she have it? What made her do it?

I sort of figured that something broke lose inside of her when she lost her husband and so she found this manic behavior to occupy her time. Wyatt’s Nana glass is up for your own interpretation, but I know that constantly trying to understand his family and that is just a little piece of it for him.

How have audiences been responding at readings? Are you still taking the book around on tour?

Ah, the “book tour.” I seriously thought that was a real thing. I mean, I’m sure that well-known authors with a serious track record or maybe authors with small presses might be taken to a few cities by their publishers, but at this point there is so little money in publishing that the houses are struggling to keep afloat which means authors are left to self-promote and that is like taking on a 4th job.

I’m trying to visit friends around the U.S. and use the visits as stops to do readings. I’m going to North Carolina, where my brother and his family live. I’ll read for a couple book clubs and maybe a bookstore. The readings themselves are a blast. I love talking to folks about the book and seeing people excited. I’m especially excited to get responses from young adults. I did a reading in Prairie du Sac, Wisconsin month back and two young boys showed up, dropped of by their parents. They sat in the front row and wouldn’t look me in the eye they were so nervous, but as soon as I opened it up to questions they raised their hands and came up with some of the most astute observations I’ve gotten so far. They seemed to really “get” Wyatt. And that makes all the hard work worth it!

Read more about Jeff at his site, buy his incredible book.

- DB

Book Description

Wyatt Reaves takes the seat next to you, bloodied and soaking wet, and he is a big-fisted beast. Tell him to stretch out like an X across asphalt and you’ve got a parking space. But Wyatt’s been taking it lying down for too long, and he is NOT happy.

Since he turned twelve and a half, he’s been living with his uncle, a traveling salesman of mysterious agenda and questionable intent. Soon, Uncle Spade sees the potential in “kiddo” to earn cash. And that’s enough to keep the boy around for nearly six years.

But what life does Wyatt deserve? Alcohol? Drugs? Bare-fisted fights? Tattoos? No friends? No role models? Living in a car?

If you’re brave enough to stay and listen, you’ll hear an astounding story. It’s not a pretty road Wyatt has traveled, but growing up rarely is.

Praise for WHY I FIGHT

“A breathtaking debut with an unforgettable protagonist…His painful and poignant story is a wonderful combination of the unlettered and the eloquent.” –Booklist (starred review)

“For male reluctant readers.” –Kirkus Reviews