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the
current
Monday
Report
below!
This week's report by Tim W. Brown
"Bitter, Not Humble"
I’m shopping my fourth book, a comic historical novel set in 1830s
America. Another week, another rejection letter arrives.
Admittedly, my work is quirky. All my novels share a dry, almost
arid, sense of humor. I poke fun at things that people take very
seriously, such as politics, corporate life, academia and especially art
and literature. I’ll be the first to confess that my writing isn’t for
everybody—a lot of sacred cows get butchered. However, I can
confidently say that it resembles nothing being published today. I
would think that this would be attractive to an editor motivated to
publish something with an unexpired freshness date.
But no. The commercial fiction market continues to be led by
tiresome psychologically driven novels, which have been
predominant, oh, forever. Otherwise, “transgressive” content is the
trend. If your protagonist is a dick-less man or a dildo-clad woman,
and he/she/it is sufficiently sympathetic, then editors might pay
attention. Have readers really gotten so jaded that only characters
from extreme subcultures capture their interest?
A couple of years ago Poets & Writers Magazine published the
profiles of several young editors at major houses. To a person they
declared they were on the hunt for new and different fiction. Yet
when presented with such work (mine, for example), editors young
and old reject it. They’re clearly in cover-your-ass mode — they take
zero chances to preserve their career prospects. They’re not
interested in advancing literature, only themselves and the media
conglomerates that employ them.
Indeed, editors younger than I, say, in their 20s and 30s, don’t get my
work at all. Coming of age in the post-Raymond Carver era, they
wouldn’t recognize what a damn picaresque novel was if it reared up
and bit off their tits. HELLO! Character psychology isn’t uppermost
in my mind; rather, social manners and cultural clashes are.
Sometimes I fear that mine (I was born in 1961) is the last truly
literate generation.
What’s the alternative to commercial publishing? Art for art’s sake
literature published by academic institutions. Only language matters
to these people —fuck plot, character and setting—the more surreal
and nonsensical the better. David Foster Wallace is the most
mainstream exemplar of this tendency in which logorrhea is confused
with genius. Christ, can nobody write a decent yarn anymore? Am I
the only writer who feels swallowed down a publishing black hole
wherein my work isn’t commercial enough for trade publishers and
not “experimental” enough for academic presses?
That leaves the small press. Here you’d think that risk taking and
bold thinking were paramount. But small press publishers often don’t
get it either. My observation has been that when they’re not
publishing fiction for microscopic niches, they’re publishing
cookbooks and gardening manuals or, worse, rarified letterpress
editions of poetry or, the very worst, poorly conceived and designed
chapbooks. The single area for which there seems to be an unlimited
publishing market is crappy poetry that is evenly distributed among
academic journals and grassroots presses.
I realize that the above rant sounds like sour grapes. Press readers are
probably thinking, “If your writing were really that good, it would
find a publisher.” But my work has in fact been published—by
magazine editors looking for writing that’s not been workshopped to
death in MFA programs and by one brave book publisher that
actively sought new, challenging voices. (Alas, he closed up shop a
few years ago, frustrated by distribution hassles.)
Only lately have I been stymied in my publishing efforts. Is it too
much to ask that editors open their minds, meet us writers halfway in
trying to understand what we’re doing, and not summarily reject our
work because it doesn’t fit the publishing herd’s preconceived
notions? They may be surprised and sell a few books.
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TIM W. BROWN is the author of two published novels,
Deconstruction Acres (1997) and Left of the Loop (2001). His latest
literary effort is a comic historical novel set in 1830s America, a
time of social experimentation and reform fervor.
Brown’s fiction, poetry and nonfiction have appeared in over two
hundred publications. He currently serves on the advisory council
of the Small Press Center in New York City, and he is a member of
the National Book Critics Circle. From 1982 to 1999 Brown edited
and published Tomorrow Magazine, a poetry zine featuring a wide
variety of underground and performance poets.
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