Perusing "The New England Review"

The journal experiment has been such a glorious thing, with unexpected surprises. This office's first copy of The New England Review arrived, and again, it is different from any other journal out there. The more I practice this fascinating exercise of studying literary journals, the more convinced I become that the time-honored practice of writing a poem or a short story in private and then sending it various places to see where it sticks is less my style -- I prefer the notion of understanding a journal as an entity and writing just for it.

(Flannery O'Connor might argue with me. She had her own way, and in the late 1940s she resisted so strongly her first editor's pleas for conformity that they ended up not working together, with each party declaring the other intractable. Maybe she was right. But this is for now my opinion.)

My first impression of The New England Review is that its size and the unfussy quality of the paper combine to give it the feel of a workbook. Unlike The Georgia Review that is rich with illustrations, or The Virginia Quarterly Review that features photography leaning toward a global, human rights focus, this copy of NER has no images except black-and-white ones in the ads, and the simple cover is a closeup of an abstract painting. No fuss, no drumrolls, just the work, laid out page by austere page. There is a certain cleanness to that, a lack of sentimentality. Also, NER has less of the perceived pretension that kept me away from the literary journals for such an unfortunately long time. Dare I say, it seems approachable. (But then, so does Ploughshares in a different way).

Of the 27 contributors to this 30th-anniversary edition, nine are faculty members, and that's good news both for those employed within and without the academy. For academics, it is comforting to know that a full third of the contributions come from us. For non-academics, it is good to know that two-thirds work elsewhere and publish very well. The notion that there would be a robust representation of academics but not an overwhelming majority interests me. I don't know what it means, but it seems balanced.

The oddest thing about all of this is that I have begun to read more poetry. It has long been my greatest challenge, as I have consistently preferred prose forms. But the poetry showcased in these journals has tended toward the extraordinary, and I begin each day with anticipation of it.

To a reader who might ask if I read these journals in one sitting, the answer is absolutely not. I try to make one copy last about two months, with readings from it every day or two. Sometimes I'll go a few days and not read, and then other times I might read for an hour, but I do dip in and out. One goal of the journal experiments -- besides learning the nature of many journals by reading them as a regular subscriber, and besides heightening awareness of their richness for those aspiring authors who may benefit richly from discovering that world -- is to make shorter work such as short fiction and poetry part of the fabric of everyday life. I eat, I wash, I walk the dogs, I read poems, I garden, I visit friends, I read short fiction, I dance, I sing, I pray, I study, I read novels, I rise, I sleep, I worship, I read nonfiction. Amen.

Publishing cliché series -- is it true that "Editors don't edit anymore"?

I've decided to start a little series dedicated to the shopworn publishing clichés I hear in this goofy, amazing profession. The first is something I hear from unpublished authors mostly, that "Editors don't edit anymore." Then Ecco editor Lee Boudreaux brought it up again as a sore point in the March/April Poets & Writers. Boudreaux points out "Having worked at two different houses, I literally do not know who they're talking about. Who just acquires and doesn't edit? I feel like everybody I've ever worked with sweats blood over manuscripts. And you reap the rewards of doing that."

Agreed. My editor at Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Elisabeth Kallick Dyssegaard, worked so hard. I was amazed at the dedication, the time invested in back-and-forth work over drafts, and the general sense of care and craft that went into Elisabeth's work.

When some people hoist this particular canard (and yes, I know that I'm combining clichés here), they also like to cite Maxwell Perkins -- the longsuffering editor of Thomas Wolfe's Southern Gothic doorstop Look Homeward, Angel -- as a real editor. Oh please. Even Wolfe finally decided that the interdependence had to end, and he left Perkins's publishing house, Scribners, to sign with Knopf. If you're going to cite Perkins as a real editor and the rest as pikers, then I'll consign you to a corner of literary hell where all you can read for eternity is The Great Gatsby and The Sun Also Rises over and over and over and over again.

Corny song for a Friday

@Booklounge, the digital team of Random House of Canada, tweeted this goofiness for a Friday and the First Day of Spring. It's by '90s Canadian band Moxy Früvous.

Hmmm, I may enter this contest

This gem comes from indiebound.org, a web resource to help you locate and shop at your local independent bookseller. It's sad that you'd need a website to find an independent bookstore any longer, but so many of them have closed that this really makes sense.

Announcing the IndieBound Voices of Indie Consumers Contest!

It's really easy: make a video, no more than 3 minutes long, about why you shop at indie retailers, what resonates for you about the Shop Local movement, why you feel passionately about your community, and maybe even mention a local store or two . . .

Post it to YouTube or Vimeo or any video-sharing site, and send us an email when it's there. One videographer will be chosen to win a bunch of IndieBound swag!

Details are available at the website.

To understand a university press, know its catalogues

University press catalogues are indispensable to learning a press's tastes and culture. Yet I'm amazed when faculty members come to me with an interest in a certain press, but no particular drive to read its catalogues. One woman even gently asked, "Isn't that your job?"

Of course it is, but it is also the job of each author who approaches a press with a prospectus and a dream. The common-but-naive notion that the manuscript is what it is, and therefore should be shopped to 20 or 30 presses until one of them "gets" it, represents one of the most interesting bits of human psychology that I've encountered in this wonderful profession. It's not the author or the manuscript who should adapt, this thinking goes, but the press. If only the press would see things differently, squint a little and appreciate, read more deeply, then it (depersonalized, not an editor but an edifice) will at last understand.

In reality, publishing decisions are made by teams of actual people, and they are usually made at meetings, not in imagined solitude. One of the first things a group of editors considers when examining new prospectuses is the rest of its list. What else does the press publish and why? Where will this proposed book fit in? How will this author's reputation enhance the house? What about the press's other authors who publish similar work? The more an author understands those same questions via the study of catalogues, the better the chances that the prospectus will address these important considerations.

A case in point is this month's catalogue from the University of Minnesota Press. It arrived last week, and today I spent a joyful hour reading it. Not skimming it, not riffling through, but reading. I read book descriptions, I looked at cover art, I considered not only who was writing, but where they were placed in the catalogue, and I pondered the press in terms of its extremes (Native American studies at one end, the visual image at another, narrowly focused monographs at a third point of departure). The press publishes everything from potential bestsellers such as Paul Chaat Smith's Everything You Know About Indians Is Wrong, a book that I can imagine selling both in the Museum of the American Indian, where he is associate curator, and in Barnes & Noble, where it might logically appear alongside work by Sherman Alexie. On the other end of the spectrum is Reticulations: Jean-Luc Nancy and the Networks of the Political, representing the scholarly monograph that many of us yearn to keep alive in university press publishing, and would hate to see pass away in favor of the potential bestseller.

A salt with a deadly weapon

Whenever I meet wonderful new people, I try to get a group together of ones who seem as though they might enjoy one another's company. By last autumn I had met several these fascinating folks, all of whom are writers (a playwright, a journalist-playwright, and a poet), and that always calls for a dinner party. Little did I know that something as innocent as mango chutney on pork could have sent one guest to the emergency room. It didn't (thankfully), and she was so cool about it that I never knew there was a problem. Later, however, I learned that she had made art out of her suffering by selling a book on the subject. Sandra Beasley's book Don't Kill the Birthday Girl: Tales From an Allergic Life will be published next year by Crown. Besides writing about such serious stuff (albeit I'm certain with her characteristic flair), Sandra is an editor at The American Scholar, an award-winning, much-published poet, and the Literary Chair of the Arts Club of Washington. Her website is www.sandrabeasley.com.

Meanwhile, here's what she had to say in The Washington Post about my not-so-innocent dinner party, and the near-mayhem caused by those malicious mangoes.

I heart literary journals

It should by now be obvious to all seven readers of this blog that I am insanely, over-the-moon in love with literary journals. It's a new love. For some reason I was previously put off by some of the tweedy names, earnest covers, and a faint but unmistakable whiff of pretension. Plus I didn't much care for the handful of people I knew who submitted (an arty girl in my high school who played guitar in minor chords only; a guy in grad school who had a habit of slyly and poetically insulting his friends; any number of twits who name-dropped all the poets they met for five minutes at public readings), and I mistakenly thought that meant the journals themselves were amateur-ville.

I was completely wrong. Now that I have subscribed to several and actually read each one, issue after issue, I'm deeply impressed with the quality of the writing, the astonishingly good taste of many of the editors, and the consistent caliber of already-successful authors who don't need to publish there but who choose to because of the readership and the credibility. Receiving these journals is like receiving a valentine from the literary world each time they appear. Thank you, editors and staffs, for creating these gems. I believe journals will be the keepers of literary fiction and poetry during tough economic times for books, and that the good ones will survive.

Here is a partial list of those to which I have subscribed. There will be more in the future: Georgia Review, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly Review, Indiana Review, New England Review, Missouri Review, Threepenny Review. Any suggestions for others?

PS: If you love fiction and/or poetry, please show it by subscribing to literary journals. Yes, you can read them at the library, especially if you work at a university, but do consider going that extra step and buying actual and ongoing subscriptions.

Great quote, but is it Vonnegut?

So much has been falsely attributed to Kurt Vonnegut that I hesitate to quote this, but it's apt. I first saw it in Poets & Writers on an ad for Butler University's MFA program, but a quick internet search suggests it has been a darling of book bloggers for quite a while.

"When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth."

I love the word "ineffable," because it sums it up: it means "Incapable of being expressed in words."

Sara Nelson in The Daily Beast

Kudos to The Daily Beast for running work by laid-off Publisher's Weekly editor-in-chief Sara Nelson. The blog item below came from her work.

How to get your fiction or even poetry published

Hudson River hero Chesley Sullenberger has demonstrated once and for a key publishing principle I've emphasized for years. He just got a $3 million book deal for a quickie about his splash landing on New York's iconic river, and his agent scored a tagalong coup. The publisher will also issue a volume of his inspirational poems. This is a variation on what I've said to authors since at least 1997: if you want agents and publishers to care about your fiction or your poetry, make some money for them first on a commercial nonfiction project. Many publishers will please a moneymaking author by agreeing to publish fiction, even if it doesn't "earn out," as long as the author's nonfiction is a steady plus for the team. Poems are a longer shot, but if your nonfiction earns enough (and Sullenberger's probably will), it's possible.

Personally, I'm no more likely to read Sullenberger's poems than I was to ponder the musings of that sweet but ubiquitous kid, Mattie Stepanek, and his Heartsongs series. But he'll surely find an audience -- perhaps enough that the poetry will do well. And who knows? Sullenberger might surprise me and become a meaningful addition to my poetry reading life (I'm still campily fond of Rod McKuen, and I'll defend him to the death, me hearties), but whether he does or doesn't, he got what he wanted from a publisher by bringing home some bacon for them first.


The above image of Rod McKuen is from Life magazine.

Maurice Jackson at the Library Company

Dr. Maurice Jackson's new book, Let This Voice Be Heard: Anthony Benezet, Father of Atlantic Abolitionism, is taking off like a rocket. Here's a great photo of him at the Library Company of Philadelphia this week. This office hosted him on campus last week, and his talk was electrifying. As soon as photos are available (the bookseller from our campus bookstore took some great shots), I'll post them here as well.

The Revenge of Bonnie Morris

I get a major kick out of Georgetown Women's Studies lecturer Bonnie Morris, who appeared like a comet in my office when Booklab was just getting rolling. I went to see her amazing one-woman show "The Revenge of the Women's Studies Professor" when she performed in DC a couple of years back, and now I'm happy to note that it's a new (last month!) book from Indiana University Press. "Dr. Bon" is an oldskool feminist with two books that were finalists for the Lambda literary award, and a seat on the board of Mothertongue, a DC-based spoken-word theatre space for women. She has more energy than a sugar-fed fifth-grader, and if you thought sexism was a thing of the past, her books will get you thinking twice.

It be National Grammar Day

To celebrate March 4, the official National Grammar Day, I'm gonna confess something. I was never hot stuff at grammar. Ever. I was always one of the best writers in class, and one of the most mediocre grammarians. Apparently I have an ear for the vernacular, and I even do okay with formalish text, but when it comes to not splitting one's infinitives, um, I do. Sometimes.

Even so, they have a fun way to celebrate that I might just participate in anyway... if you find an example of bad grammar on the web, take a screenshot of it (hit "print" and then paste into an e-mail) and send it to info@spogg.org (SPOGG is the Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar -- a club that would never have me as a member).

Here's a link to the Official National Grammar Day website. Those of you who have better grammar than me can freely correct whatever nudge-wink blips you find in this post.

In love with the "Most Coveted Covers"

If you want to fall happily into a blog and not come back, visit Readerville Journal and check out the Most Coveted Covers. The founder and editor, Karen Templer, is a former art director at Salon.com who now works as a writer. I was immediately taken with the artful way she describes the covers she loves and craves. Most artists I know are less adept at saying why they love something, and helping the not-so-artful understand not just that it works, but some of the reasons why.

Kudos to the Authors Guild

Amazon backed down remarkably easily on the text-to-speech question, and it now leaves the decision to individual copyright holders whether or not to include their books in Kindle2's new text-to-speech feature. Amen, amen. I haven't read the Guild's press release on this yet (maybe they're snowed in), but it seems like a victory.

Journal Experiments -- Back to Basics

Last year I started The Journal Experiments, but then life and work got in the way and I drifted. Now I'm back to them again, and interested in hearing your thoughts about supporting journals. The Experiments consist of subscribing to, reading, and getting to know journals as unique entities -- little artistic corporate cultures, if you will -- and then submitting to them based on that understanding. This is the opposite of the usual author or poet strategy of writing something and then sending it out scattershot to see where it lands. The latter is part of I Am Writer, World Bend To Me... whereas the Journal Experiments are about the writer serving the medium (think about 17th-century bards writing for the stage, that sort of thing). One is author-focused, the other -- my preferred -- is audience-focused. Neither is correct in contrast to the other's incorrectness, they're simply different.

On that note, the Winter 2008 Georgia Review that I'm just now getting around to contains a fun Call For Submissions. The journal plans a special feature, "A Devil's Dictionary for the Twenty-First Century," "an update of sorts of Ambrose Bierce's brilliant satirical work... published just about one hundred years ago." Interested in submitting? Here be the link.

Reading to earn freedom

Did you see this piece by Leah Price in The New York Times about prisoners who can join a book club to earn time out of jail? English professor Robert Waxler at UMass-Dartmouth started it, working with a judge and a probation officer. Here's how Price describes a class: The eight others are convicted criminals who have been granted probation in exchange for attending, and doing the homework for, six twice-monthly seminars on literature. The class is taught through Changing Lives Through Literature, an alternative sentencing program that allows felons and other offenders to choose between going to jail or joining a book club.

What an unusual and smart idea. The biggest hurdle I can see is fundamental literacy. I have taught in jail before, and some felons have such challenges with simple reading and writing that they will need to do a lot of work before a book by John Steinbeck or Toni Morrison makes sense to them. For those who read well, though (and I encountered some highly literate people in jail, too), this is a creative and constructive idea.

There are also two fair arguments that (a) it's not right for prisoners to get personal tutoring from college professors and access to their otherwise expensive classes when many of their victims cannot afford such luxuries; and (b) books shouldn't be transformed into punishment. I'll grant both arguments have merit. But I still like to see people thinking laterally about alternatives to incarceration, especially for nonviolent offenders.

Why I agree with the Author's Guild lawsuit

The new Author's Guild lawsuit regarding Amazon Kindle's text-to-speech feature is quite controversial. Many who supported the Guild when it sued Google over digitization of books under copyright and won are now not supporting it on this fight. His eminence (at least to me) Neil Gaiman has weighed in, saying that he doesn't understand why the Guild opposes free text-to-speech, since it's the equivalent of having the right to read it aloud himself. Gaiman's agent argues the opposite, that Amazon is infringing on quite valuable audiobook rights. That's the Guild's position as well.

Why do I support the Guild? Simple. I don't think we're talking about the technology as it exists today. Text-to-speech at the moment is still robotic and largely uninteresting -- it would never compete against your favorite readers of audiobooks. But what happens when it gets better? What happens when you can even tweak it to sound like your preferred gender, age, and region of the country? What happens when it's so good you think you're hearing a live person read?

What happens is that the book's author, who under today's rules would have earned a nice profit from that audio version of the book, won't get anything. I think authors make precious little enough as it is. And though I enjoy my Kindle, I think Amazon is dead wrong on this one. Unpopular position? Yes, I know. But that's where I am.

Pogue said it

If you like new tech toys, how you feel about David Pogue probably says a world of other things about you, such as your clothing choices (Brooks Brothers or quirky designer?), your food preferences (three squares a day with meat, or vegan grazing?), and your voting habits (red or, um, you get the picture). The only problem is, I'm not sure whether liking or loathing Pogue makes you one way or the other. It just says something.

I like Pogue most of the time, and if he should fail to please me then I just don't keep reading him. But mostly he makes me smile, and today he did with his review of Amazon's new Kindle. I've had Amazon's old Kindle for about a year and a half now, and I love it. My only gripes are small -- I keep forgetting to bring it with me, and when I do remember it, such as on vacation, I keep forgetting to bring the charger. But the Kindle is convenient, easy to read, and (best blessing of all) you can download a book while stuck on a city bus without having to pay for a monthly account.

Nothing in Pogue's review made me want to buy the new Kindle. I'm fine with the one I have. But here's the nut graf (for me) when he discusses those who claim one type of e-reader will win out over all others, who will of necessity fade away: The point everyone is missing is that in Technoland, nothing ever replaces anything. E-book readers won’t replace books. The iPhone won’t replace e-book readers. Everything just splinters. They will all thrive, serving their respective audiences.

Amen, and I think that statement can be expanded to include the false dichotomy between paper books and e-books. I welcome e-books, but some who know my paper-loving, rare-books-buying ways are horrified. Am I nuts? A traitor? Nope, I simply agree with Pogue. Different products will serve different audiences in various specific applications.

Not scary at all.

How much do I love this?

At last, someone even odder than I when it comes to re-reading. I am a compulsive re- and re-re-reader of certain special books, even when stacks upon stacks of unread books beckon. It makes no sense (or maybe it makes all sense), but now The Rumpus has a story about a woman who has read Thomas Hardy's The Return of the Native over and over again for twelve years.

That reminds of the summer a few years ago, when I still taught in Georgetown's English Department, that I decided to read three Thomas Hardy novels back-to-back: The Return of the Native was one, along with The Mayor of Casterbridge and Jude the Obscure. I had twice taught Tess of the d'Urbervilles as part of an 18th-19th Century Survey course ("snortin' the Norton" as students waggishly called it), but I hadn't read the rest, so this was a great treat. Between books I'd wander down the hall to John Pfordresher's office and ask him questions about them, which he'd patiently answer. I loved them all and became an enraptured Hardy admirer, though I can't quite imagine reading one over and over again for twelve years. But cheers to Julie Vanderburg, that noble reader, and to The Rumpus for writing about her.

Thanks to @MaryContrary08 on Twitter for tweeting the link...

E-textbooks? Really? NPR reports.

Are physical college textbooks due to to become relics? At Northwest Missouri State the change to digital is already happening. This NPR piece by Sylvia Maria Gross demonstrates through audio clips how this "new generation of textbooks" capitalizes on interactive technology.

For those of you who want to publish textbooks, is there a way to make this work in your favor? Are there ways you can think of to make your proposed textbook intelligently (rather than arbitrarily, I suppose) interactive? Think about it -- you can have more maps and images, alternate text, audio. This represents a serious change, but also (possibly) a serious opportunity.

NB: On this piece, the comments section has some interesting tidbits (see the bottom of the article accompanying the audio piece), and are worth reading.

Kudos to a writer

Laurence Hughes has a strong and resonant article in the last-page "Soapbox" section of Publisher's Weekly for February 23 about how it feels to be laid off in publishing right now. All I can say is that I hope he considers writing a book of his own if he hasn't already.

The piece is so well written, and while what's happening in publishing is heartrending (don't these companies imposing such brutal layoffs know the meaning of the words pull together?), I found myself cheering for him to find his true north as an author, and have the last laugh.

Throw Down in Poets & Writers!

You have to look for it, but the March/April edition of Poets & Writers contains a wee bit of controversy. First is the outraged, almost bitter letter, aghast at the notion that authors should be responsible for any aspect of book promotion: I would think agents would want their writers holed up in a shack in the boonies typing away at their next project, not wasting precious moments plying the very superficial talk show circuit. Book promotion belongs to the publisher, who seems to be tossing off many of its duties these days. I say let's let writers do what they do best and leave sales to the people in suits.

Then, on page 57 there's a terrific interview with four editors, and Richard Nash of Soft Skull Press articulates the opposite opinion: Get out into the world. And if you don't have the personality to get out into the world, then you have to ask yourself, "Why does everybody else have to have the personality to get out into the world, but I don't? What makes me so special that everybody else has to go out and bang the drum for me, but I don't?" I have a fairly limited tolerance for people who assume that it is everybody else's job to sell their books while they get to be pure and pristine.

It's probably obvious if you have ever read this blog that my heart is with Nash, but the opinion of the unhappy author (whom I won't name, but you can identify at the above link) is quite common. Authors imagine that their publishers don't care, that they haven't tried, and that somehow it's someone else's fault if the book fails to find its most perfect (usually identified in authors' minds as "largest") audience.

Most publishers play their hearts out, authors. And a tip of the champagne glass to those of you who understand that, and who do what you can to help your own books find their homes on shelves, and in hearts.

A quote that's either funny or depressing

From a Publisher's Weekly interview with Charlotte Roche, a German television presenter who has just published her first novel, Wetlands:

PW: Who are your [literary] influences?

HM: I don't read at all. Since my daughter was born six years ago, I've only read one book, and that was because my best friend pushed me to read her favorite book, "The Great Gatsby." But I think not being a big reader makes me freer in writing; I always hear that authors who read lots also get blockages -- they have these idols and they try to be like them. I don't have that problem at all.

The novel is reportedly an increasingly uncomfortable meditation on bodily functions. A bestseller in Germany, it will soon be printed in 27 countries!

What libraries' buying patterns mean for you

If you're an academic author, you're familiar with the same old problem: the university press prices your book at $90 or $100 and releases it in hardback only, to profit as much as possible from academic libraries. Many of you have shaken your fists in frustration while telling me that your publisher "won't listen" when you beg for a more affordable price. Elsewhere in this blog I've explored alternatives (negotiating a special, lower cover price only for your students at your academic bookstore, for example -- something some presses will do if they want you badly enough, as long as they are protected by the assurance that you won't open these sales to others), but the process of educating academic authors about university press financial realities is always with us.

Now along comes a report from the Association of Research Libraries about what may change in acquisitions during the economic downturn. Libraries are facing acquisitions budget cutbacks that may be permanent. You may not have known it, but some publishers have structured book prices differently depending on the size and budget of the library. From the report: Large libraries have also been subject to a novel form of inflation pressure as some publishers have implemented new pricing models, such as tiered pricing, that shift revenue generation to larger institutions that are required to absorb significant price increases to compensate for discounting to other customers. Publishers implementing changes in pricing models that provide discounts to small customers by balancing them with increases to larger customers will be especially likely to force large institutions into cancellation decisions.

Whoa, that's deep. The upshot is that the report calls for university presses to consider cutting prices. But don't pop the champagne just yet. After many university press visits, I've become convinced that the price structures have their place -- the margins are so thin at so many places that if they couldn't get this guaranteed money from research library acquisitions, some books couldn't be published at all.

Any trainwreck usually results in the little guy getting thrown into a cowfield somewhere, and guess who that is? Yep, the author. If the engine (research libraries) cut back, and the middle cars (university presses) lower prices, the caboose (those academic authors who have niche audiences) may just find themselves fishtailing wildly and hurled from the tracks.

It's my job to look out for all of my academic authors, but especially the caboose. I'll make recommendations as I can (how about "Look out!"). But this key recommendation has always been true -- be bold, and write a book with a measurable audience. You don't have to turn yourself into a trade author and you shouldn't, but now more than ever it is important that academic authors ponder along with their future editors about who the book serves and why -- what makes it essential. And if you're getting feedback from editor after editor that your book looks fascinating but just doesn't have a demonstrable audience, listen to that and think about what you as an author can do to help. Then come talk to me, and we'll try to sort through this together.

James J. O'Donnell at the Smithsonian Associates

Provost Jim O'Donnell's evening with the Smithsonian Associates is just a month away, and it's selling briskly so reserve now if you want to attend. Wednesday, March 18, 6:45 p.m., at the S. Dillon Ripley Center on the National Mall, and he'll be speaking about his new book, The Ruin of the Roman Empire.

The Smithsonian Associates program is one of the most elegant ways to see authors in Washington. I'm a huge fan, and the range and depth of classes and presentations is amazing. While you're at the website, be sure to browse their other offerings. It is one of Washington's jewels, and one of the best benefits of living in this great city.

Questions from the most recent, um, webinar

It amuses me that after having once made a bit of a name for myself as an outspoken critic of distance learning, I've gotten roped into teaching something called a "webinar," but it was for the best of reasons -- alumni! -- and it actually turned out great. Yesterday I had the privilege of spending an hour with 40+ Georgetown alumni on the web, discussing nonfiction book publishing and how to get a literary agent. Next week we'll meet again for a one-hour session on publishing fiction.

The best part of leading one of these seminars is the Q&A afterward, because the questions always surprise me. One author with amazing media credentials wanted to know if a literary agent would help her place articles in national magazines as a prelude to creating a nonfiction book proposal. For most people the answer would be no, because there isn't any money to be made on a percentage of the fee for an article. However in this questioner's case the answer is "It depends." A literary agent who happens to have a background as a subsidiary rights director in a publishing house (and there are a few of those) might have strong contacts at national magazines, so it might be worth asking.

Author credentials are the key, and this potential author had extraordinary ones. If you have them, great, but if you happen to be a mere mortal (aren't most of us?) then you will still want to land those major magazine or journal pieces, but you probably won't be able to enlist a literary agent's help. I'm not 100% certain that Ms. Media who asked the question will, either, but in her case I do think it is worth an ask.

A Valentine For You

People have asked if I can name a great, romantic book for Valentine's Day. Not offhand, but I sure remember a great sex scene! It's from Ken Follett's 1981 Eye of the Needle, pages 247-247.

Happy Valentine's Day.

View the actual Emancipation Proclamation. For reals.

If you want something fascinating to do tonight and you're in the DC area, hop over to the opening of the Library of Congress's Abraham Lincoln bicentennial exhibition. You'll see the actual first drafts of the Emancipation Proclamation and the Gettysburg Address, plus his first and second inaugural addresses. The exhibition runs through May 9, but tonight is the time for special evening hours.

Okay, yeah, this isn't exactly a book-packed event, but the Library of Congress is an amazing treasure, and I enjoy giving people excuses to go there whenever possible.

A C-Note Well Spent

I'm a contrarian, so in these tough economic times I'm going to suggest that you spend money on something you can't even take home with you. The Folger Shakespeare Library is hosting Acquisitions Night on March 18, as a fundraiser. Why is it worth dropping a hundred dolla on them? Here's the squib:

Guests have the chance to personally examine books and ask questions as the curators and librarians reveal the newest additions to the world-renowned Folger collection in the Old Reading Room. The reading rooms are only open to the public once a year and are a stunning setting for this special night. A buffet dinner is served in the historic Great Hall, where guests can enjoy the spring exhibition, To Sleep, Perchance to Dream.

You will even have the opportunity to adopt a rare book, manuscript or work of art. If you have ever had the extraordinary pleasure of doing research using Very Old Books and coming across someone's bookplate from 300 years ago, you'll appreciate the shivery excitement of having your own name put on a literary treasure to delight and surprise someone 300 years hence.

The photo above, from the Folger web site, shows guests at Acquisitions Night 2008.

Don't mind me and this 100-pound anvil

Some authors have a funny way of defending their approaches to books. Something psychological can occur to cause the author of a magnum opus to feel extraordinarily attached to it, even if it has obvious flaws that cause near-universal concern. Take, for example, the scholar who knows that he has written about two ideas that don't really mesh together naturally, except in his own mind. He has now written a longish manuscript (450 pages) about both, dealing in the first half with the earlier phenomenon, and then through a linking chapter, turning to the second phenomenon. Several editors have suggested he turn it into two books. One would think, given the pressure to publish academically, that notion would appeal to him. Two for the work of one, what's not to love? But instead I often find him in my office, defending his doorstop and asking me to give him the magic words to help editors see that the book must be this way.

Another author has a book with a universally acknowledged boring first chapter, but (says he) it has to be there as an introduction to what comes next. Hmmmm. I suggest that if it remains there then it renders the rest of the book unnecessary, because no living begin will read that far.

But many authors defend their literary anvils, often furiously. Sometimes the authors become quite annoyed with me, before I've had a chance to say a word. I'll just sit there while the author explains the enormous, obvious problem of the book, and then proceeds to argue for it item by item, becoming increasingly annoyed with me for what s/he perceives must be my unspoken thoughts on the matter. (Either that or my eyes speak volumes, and I'm unaware of it.)

I'm not saying that authors should cut, rearrange, re-write or otherwise muck about with their books just to please colleagues, editors and agents. That kind of insecure pandering is dangerous, and it can lead to a bland, groupthink manuscript that speaks to no one. But I do believe that collective wisdom can occasionally be wise, especially when every reader has the same issue in the same place.

Chick lit as a career move

As the post-holiday bad film season settles around us, I notice a couple of big-budget films based on chick lit books: Confessions of a Shopaholic and He's Just Not That Into You. I'm blogging about this because one of the biggest surprises of this job was the interestingly high number of full-time academics who would like to write and publish chick lit. I see at least one every season or so in my office who imagines this would be a fun, quirky career move.

In an act of full disclosure, I confess that I develp a rash whenever near the chick lit genre in any of its forms, and even though I pride myself on trying to read a bit of everything in the name of research, I have not been able to force myself to dip into a single one of those pink-covered literary confections that celebrate shoes, shopping, and sex. But then, I haven't read a word of Harry Potter, either, and the globe still seems to spin. But perhaps my allergy to the genre means I'm not the best judge of any of this. In fact, I'm probably the worst.

Still, the phenomenon is remarkable, whether you share my distaste for all things shopping, or whether you're a girlier type who enjoys that sort of book as an escape now and again. Why do so many academic authors also want to publish chick lit? What makes an otherwise intelligent and arguably over-educated faculty member think "Hey, in addition to my teaching, committee work and scholarly publishing, I think I'll type up a frothy little romance about an American doctoral student in London, no, make that Paris, who has an ooh-la-la affair with a sexy Middle Eastern scholar, only to return to the States and realize that he's the new head of her department. Along the way she goes shopping in the world's most famous venues (all on her teaching assistant's salary, but this is fiction), and she finds herself fending off advances from a surly, sexy biker who turns out to be an English movie star in deep disguise, and . . ."

My usual advice to someone contemplating this is to ask what will happen if you become famous for the book. What if it's a hit? The authors usually pooh-pooh this ("It's just for fun," "I'm doing this on the side," "I really want to be known for my research"), and I say that's great, but we can't control the world once we launch a book into it. We've conditioned ourselves for marginality and irrelevance, but what happens if you become a chick lit star? Do you want that reality for yourself? Is that your choice and goal?

If yes, then type away. I'm sure Sophie Kinsella or Greg Behrendt are easy enough to knock from their pedestals... and I will be happy for you if you succeed. I'll even bring pink champagne to your book party! But if your interest in writing the book is contingent on it remaining hidden from the world, then think twice. Go out there with something you will be proud of whether in its obscurity, or in the brilliant glare of its international fame.

Who is buried in Derrida's tomb?

Michael Bérubé has given me realistic flashbacks along with chills and attendant paranoia. How, you ask? By writing an excellent article for The Chronicle of Higher Education about re-taking the GRE in English Literature. We both went to graduate school at the University of Virginia (different years -- I didn't know him), and we both struggled through what I personally thought was a ridiculous exam. I never knew that others felt the same, except for one good hint... after I was in I met one of the committee members who had accepted my application. I asked her what she thought of the subject test (where I struggled), and she said "Oh, we've known for years that it's flawed... I personally didn't count it although I can't speak for my colleagues."

Here's the funniest quote, although it's rather insider-y unless you have taken this particular test: The three questions that asked you to identify which city was being described in which poem — those were bad questions too, suitable more for Jeopardy! than for an exam in English literature. Alas, I got many bad questions right, sometimes through sheer dumb luck. Among the ones I missed, I couldn't remember what the "euphuistic" style is, and I couldn't remember which war novelist — Stephen Crane, Faulkner, Joseph Heller, Ernest Hemingway, or Norman Mailer — had not seen combat.

It was precisely the latter sort of questions that infuriated me. They had nothing to do with the study of anything, and I'm thankful that the admissions committee at Virginia agreed. My criticism of standardized testing is well-documented -- I wrote about it in my second book -- so this piece was most welcome.

Scary, though.

How an academic author earns global publicity, click by click

Bob Thompson of The Washington Post has an interesting longer piece about American-gone-to-New Zealand academic author Denis Dutton, best known at least in this office for Arts and Letters Daily, a site I have enjoyed since its launch in 1998, moreso in its early years. Thompson explores why Dutton has been so successful flacking his new book The Art Instinct. My only surprise is that there is any surprise -- Dutton was early onto the internet with a useful site, providing content when there wasn't much, and he must have worked extraordinarily hard. Coming up with a great idea for a website is easy. Making it successful and keeping it that way year after year is extraordinarily difficult.

Author after author comes to me with the same pitiful lament about the publisher's publicist who won't do enough to push the book. (It's the most vintage whine in publishing.) Please, authors, know that there is only one person who woke up this morning passionately in love with your book, and that is you. You are the publicist. If the book is to succeed, it is your job. Yes, publishers try their best, but they have hundreds of books to sell. At any given time you usually have only one.

So does this mean you should run out and found a website like Arts and Letters Daily? Maybe, but I certainly couldn't pull that off. It could mean more simply that you might have wonderful fun being creative about what you do have to offer the world, and how through that gift the world might also learn about your splendid books.

**

If you visit ALDaily now and wonder what all the fuss was about, it used to be better. It's okay now, but lots of sites aggregate good content and it has competition. But back in the day it was fresh and different.

Words Without Borders

A friend of mine loves the work of novelist Junichiro Tanizaki. When I first met her years ago and asked "Who?", and she rightfully looked at me with shock. How could I not know? Well, now I do know, and I also understand better just how little of the world's literature is available in the United States in translation. Even when it is, it takes something like the Nobel Prize to give its sales an uptick. There are some exceptions, but few. Blame our literary isolation on the phenomenon of geography, xenophobia, or what you will, but as a nation we're just not as aware of world literature as we could be.

That's part of why I was so pleased to learn of the online magazine "Words Without Borders," a site that publishes its own original translations, plus book reviews and other information about international literature. In its publishing rationale, the journal notes: Few literatures have truly prospered in isolation from the world. English-speaking culture in general and American culture in particular has long benefited from cross-pollination with other worlds and languages. Thus it is an especially dangerous imbalance when, today, 50% of all the books in translation now published worldwide are translated from English, but less than 3% are translated into English. (Bold emphasis added)

My friend Katie King pointed the organization out to me two years ago, but it really caught my consciousness when I met its founder and president, editor Alane Salierno Mason, at W. W. Norton a few weeks ago.

I follow them, so they follow me

Okay, this is scary. About a year ago my digital strategist friend in London, Katie King, tried to get me onto Twitter. That's kind of like trying to get your 81-year-old granny to read Perezhilton.com, but I dutifully signed up for an account and then ignored it. This year, in a burst of confidence, I started Tweeting (it sounds like an adolescent rooster chick learning to crow). Soon, however, I rather liked it, and I found that many publishers are on Twitter, so I looked some up and started following them.

Now they're following me! Here's what the e-mail said:

Hi, Carole Sargent (Booklab).
Little, Brown and Co (littlebrown) is now following your updates on Twitter

Rut-roh! Isn't that a bit like reading The New York Times, and then realizing that the Times is reading you? Or as Byron Katie would put it, you're not just breathing, but you are being breathed?

I'll try to live up to my, um, following, by posting things worth knowing about. But it will be difficult. I am, after all, an 81-year-old granny trapped in the body of a much younger woman.

Dearie.

A blog about readings

For those of you who are becoming understandably concerned about the fate of literary readings in the DC area in the wake of closings such as Chapters and Olsson's, and the folding of "Book World" in The Washington Post, a local author and blogger named Mark Athitakis offers one answer: Mark Athitakis’ American Fiction Notes It's a one-stop shop of readings in the region, and to my eye both complete and easy to use. Thank you to Dr. Maurice Jackson for pointing this one out.

NB: He spells the possessive Athitakis', and I spell it Athitakis's. I think I'm one of the last editors who still prefers the full possessive. About 70% of my faculty authors agree with him, not me. The NYTimes agrees with him, too. All I have in my corner is fusty old Strunk & White, and I'm not even a major fan of that volume. ;-)

When you think you had it first

Publisher's Weekly recently launched a column about food and cooking titles called "Cooking The Books." That's such a great title, I wish I'd thought of it! Wait... I did. A few years ago. I wrote two columns with that title on cookbook publishing for Foodservice Monthly, a terrific mid-Atlantic publication edited by a dedicated Washington foodie, photographer and editor Michael Birchenall.

So did PW steal my title? It's tempting to think so, but probably not. In reality, people often think up the same titles, and even the same concepts; it happens all the time. It's part of the principle behind zeitgeist. Most of us consume a surprisingly similar porridge of popular culture, both low and high, in varying amounts, and because of this disparate people are bound to make the same mental connections simultaneously. That's part of why so many Hollywood "he stole my screenplay" legal fights aren't always open and shut. Many people may have a similar idea for -- say -- a romantic comedy, simply because we've all ingested the same formulas for so long. Think back to the Restoration stage, and how similar many of the comedies can seem.

But I still admit it grates (joke!) a little.

Origin of the Spouses

It's finally February, and I love Valentine's Day. In honor of it, I offer this quote from Charles Darwin when he courted his wife Emma. I first read of it in Christopher Benfey's New York Times Book Review article on Darwin's Sacred Cause: How a Hatred of Slavery Shaped Darwin’s Views on Human Evolution by Adrian Desmond and James Moore.

Then I found the Darwin Correspondence Project online, and looked it up.

Charles Darwin wrote to an old school friend on May 8, 1838: "As for a wife, that most interesting specimen in the whole series of vertebrate animals, Providence only knows whether I shall ever capture one or be able to feed her if caught."

Who says science types aren't romantic?


The title of this blog post and the photo above are from London's Daily Mail.

What to give your publisher on the questionnaire

When you publish a book, you'll get a questionnaire asking you many questions about your book, and asking you to write thoughtfully about it. Many authors like to postpone this, handle it quickly, or put it off altogether until the editor all but demands it.

Here's a hot tip: spend a lot of time on this important document, fill it out carefully, and turn it in early. Why? Because the book marketing team may use much of it to create important aspects of your book, including your media kit and even the copy that will go on your book cover.

Words you write on that page could actually end up on your cover if you do a really good job. They can work as flap copy, as the book's description -- if you have talent for this sort of thing, your own words can even make it into the book's advertising.

"But isn't that my publisher's job?" some authors ask. Hmmm. Let's see. They have how many books on their list each season? And besides, who better than you to perfectly describe your own work? I'm not saying that publishing professionals don't or won't write this stuff, because they do and they will, but I urge authors who are of a mind to do so to try their hand at the art form of the questionnaire.

But when they say 150 words, they mean it!

Do you listen to music while you write?

Some writers love music, and use it as a muse. Others cherish silence. I'm usually of the silence school of writing, but lately some music has worked for me... either early baroque, very old jazz, or oh-so-occasionally some new stuff like the bird and the bee (although I wish there were versions that had vocal noises but not actual words, since actual words can confuse me while I write...).

I do think people can change in their preferences over time, and even then change back again; I do imagine going back to silence more than falling further into music.

Any thoughts?

The Suspicious Cheese Lord

This is a great quote from director Darren Aronofsky about the ending of "The Wrestler" that easily applies to books as well: "I just have too many cheese alarms. If something's cheesy I just run. I just can't do it. I'd make a lot more money if I had a little more cheese in my arsenal."

PS: Wrestling seems to be my theme this academic year. See my previous post about working with Bret "The Hitman" Hart at the National Press Club Book Fair.

My favorite piece about John Updike

John Irving offers a charming and offbeat story about getting John Updike's fan mail for years, and vice versa. It is the best thing I've read about Updike; the piece makes him seem engaging, human and less like the stuffed literary lion that places like the New York Times Book Review would make him out to be.

Come to think of it, the mainstream literary establishment often does this to writers. It can shape them into creepy icons. The worst was when Barnes & Noble used to have those green shopping bags with authors' heads on them... the Anne Tyler was the most sacrilegious (although the Mark Twain was pretty gross, and Emily Dickinson was just unspeakable), and I remember wondering why on earth someone as quiet and sensible as Anne Tyler would have agreed to such a thing. It's not that the art was technically poor -- in fact it was quite good -- but that if being an author meant finally getting one's oversized head caricatured on a book bag, then make me a bricklayer, please.

I'm sure there was an Updike head at some point (can anyone find an image?). So thank you, John Irving, for writing something memorable about the man.

An article in the Chronicle about university presses

Jennifer Howard published a must-read article in this week's Chronicle of Higher Education about what various university presses are doing in this icky book-buying market. Sales are down as much as 13% at some shops, although others are doing better, largely because of individual successes in various books, or a core strength in an area such as economics that is more popular because of the downturn.

Losing Sara Nelson

It's funny how someone just doing their job can become a quasi-celebrity sometimes, but that's how I felt about Publisher's Weekly editor-in-chief Sara Nelson, who was surprisingly laid off this week. I've met plenty o' famous writers and never been tongue-tied, but when I saw Nelson at a party in New York, I got flummoxed and didn't approach her or say anything. It was her. (Silly, I should have piped up, but I had an easier time talking to Erica Jong... life isn't logical.)

She wrote a column for every issue of Publisher's Weekly, and while it was mostly a re-cap rather than news, I found it warm and engaging, and I read it every week. She often posed in that familiar wrap dress with the autumn leaves on it (see photo), and her expression was one of serenity and concern. Sara Nelson reminded me of the Washington Post's inimitable Marguerite Kelly, whom we fans probably read less for exactly what she says, than the unique and engaging way she says it.

Given Nelson's considerable experience in the publishing industry, I hope she writes a book about the bloodbath from her perspective without the muzzle of being a spokesperson for an industry journal.

And boo to the short-sighted pooh-bahs who laid her off. Way to demoralize an industry, folks.

Publishers in the news

The Washington Post has run an article about one of my professors from undergraduate school, and his elegant independent press. I didn't know that he occasionally typed on manual typewriters. My personal quirk is sometimes using an old IBM correcting Selectric II from the late 1970s, but an actual manual typewriter is even more startling.

In these days of print-on-demand publishing that creates good-looking books in small batches, running your own press doesn't seem like such a big deal, but he was doing this decades ago when a publisher still needed some sort of financial backing, or at least a significant trust fund (the latter being the genesis of many New York houses); it was and remains quite an accomplishment. You can visit the press here.

Maurice Jackson at the Library of Congress, February 26

Dr. Maurice Jackson will discuss his new book, Let This Voice Be Heard: Anthony Benezet, Father of Atlantic Abolitionism, at the Library of Congress from 4-5 on February 26. Here's information adapted from the invitation:

Anthony Benezet is recognized as the founder of the antislavery movement in America in the mid-1700s. Benezet believed the British ban on slavery should have been extended to the colonies, and worked to convince his Quaker brethren that slave-owning was not consistent with Christian doctrine.... A book sale and signing will follow the lecture, which is sponsored by the Library’s John W. Kluge Center.

Benezet transformed Quaker anti-slavery sentiment into a broad-based transatlantic movement. According to Jackson, Benezet translated ideas from diverse sources – Enlightenment philosophy, African travel narratives, Quakerism, practical life and the Bible – into concrete action. He founded the African Free School in Philadelphia, where future abolitionist leaders Absalom Jones and James Forten studied. Jackson, a former Kluge Fellow at the Library of Congress, teaches Atlantic and African-American history at Georgetown. He currently is at work on a social, political and cultural history of African Americans in Washington D.C. (1790 to the present). He is co-editor, with Jackie Bacon, of "African-Americans and the Haitian Revolution: Selected Essays and Historical Documents," to be published in 2010. Jackson will be inducted into the Washington, D.C., Hall of Fame in April for his years of service to the people in the nation’s capital.

The lecture is free and open to the public; tickets and reservations are not required.

A ringside seat to history

UPDATE January 21. Now I know why it was so easy to get in from the Georgetown side. Crowds were held back at various checkpoints elsewhere, and were unable to use their valid tickets to see the inauguration. That's sad, and I wish that my good fortune hadn't occurred while someone else in the city didn't get to be there. I didn't actually take a seat from anyone (it was almost deserted on the side I walked through), but I now know that many Blue ticket holders were disappointed.

Here is the original post from yesterday:

This has nothing to do with books, but it is so remarkable I had to post it. Today at 11:30 a.m. I was able to walk from my Georgetown home to the Watergate, grab a taxi (because it was so cold, and cabs were plentiful), and make it within two blocks of the Lincoln Memorial. No crowds! I walked right up to the very steps of the Lincoln Memorial and listened to the new President's inaugural speech from that amazing vantage point. I had a perfect view of the Reflecting Pool, the Washington Monument, and behind it, the Capitol. I call it the "Forrest Gump" angle (this photo is from the movie and shows almost exactly where I stood).

No one ever once asked me for a ticket (even though I was in a Blue ticket area), and I was not questioned by any police or guards. Going back to Georgetown was also a breeze. I walked to George Washington University and hailed a taxi at the traffic circle.

What may have happened was that the people who came at three or four in the morning got frozen out and left, and others may not have been able to get into the city at all because of congestion in the subways.

All I know is that I had a beautiful trip on a sunny, 35-degree day, I stood in an historic place as people around me wept, clapped and prayed, and I was able to return home in an orderly manner. The insane Washington of the newspapers and the blogs wasn't in evidence. It was lovely.

External validation on a complex subject

Dr. Charles King's book The Ghost of Freedom: A History of the Caucasus (Oxford 2008) has been named the 2008 "Book of the Year" by The Moscow Times. More information about him and his other books is available here.

Yes, I actually play Bookworm

This is so clichéd, but I do play Bookworm online. Wouldn't you think a book person could find something else to play, like a war game or something? Or maybe find a newer product? But I love it.

It doesn't have an end, however, so I put one in of my own. I try to get to 20,000 points within 20 moves. That's harder than it sounds.

Oh, and I play online rather than downloading it, even though doing that would enable the version that lets you make 9-letter words. Who needs 'em?

More about whether "your field" is your field

Several people wrote to me privately about the last post. Apparently there is a good bit of personal anxiety out there among many academic professionals about whether or not they're in the right field. I wish some of them had posted their thoughts in the comments, but in these days of Eternal Internet Footprints, many are shy about doing that, and I certainly understand. Still, my e-mail was lively.

Beyond the case of the assistant professor with the mashup disguised as a specialty, there are those who enjoy what they do, but don't quite know how they got there. They feel as though their careers are some sort of cosmic accident -- that they are experts in one thing when it could just as easily have been something else.

And then as if the universe were in some sort of secret accord, this quote came from Steven Pinker in today's New York Times Magazine: During my first book tour 15 years ago, an interviewer noted that the paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould had dedicated his first book to his father, who took him to see the dinosaurs when he was 5. What was the event that made me become a cognitive psychologist who studies language? I was dumbstruck. The only thing that came to mind was that the human mind is uniquely interesting and that as soon as I learned you could study it for a living, I knew that that was what I wanted to do. But that response would not just have been charmless; it would also have failed to answer the question. Millions of people are exposed to cognitive psychology in college but have no interest in making a career of it. What made it so attractive to me?

He goes on to try and analyze it, and you can read his thoughts at the link above, but I consider his question more interesting than the answer. What, indeed, made any of us turn right instead of left, or this way instead of that way? I remember the moment I decided to study the 18th century. About eight of us were in a scholarly editing class at the University of Virginia with David Vander Meulen, and we sat around a table in the rare books room at Alderman Library. He showed us the University's copy of the Declaration of Independence. Sitting there, seeing that hand-printed document, and realizing that the 18th century was one of the fields my particular graduate program was best known for, made it fall into place like a puzzle piece clicking. Perhaps I should have known what field I wanted before entering grad school (many people do), but I was fortunate that one of UVA's best offerings happened to be a perfect fit. I wouldn't change it if I had it to do over again; rather, I would have begun earlier and studied even more deeply.

But if that day hadn't happened (and if I hadn't grown up near Alexandria, Virginia, an 18th-century port city), would I have been happy doing something else? Of course, or at least I think so. Would you?

Above image from an optical illusions website.

Are you sure "your field" is really your field?

This interesting conversation happened with a pre-tenure faculty member who was having trouble placing her manuscript. "There's just so little understanding," she said, "of what it is that I do." She kept referring to "my field," but when I asked how she defined that field, she launched into a complicated explanation of a how it was a cross between two distinct areas of historical research, with a third cultural component thrown in. The mix made not-so-much sense to me because both of the historical aspects were from the Dutch late-1600s, and her literary/cultural monkey wrench was from France in the 1920s. Both were fascinating eras, but also much-studied yet oddly tacked onto one another in a "see if you can follow my logic here" way that felt both obscure and culturally disjointed. I soon found myself mentally humming "One of these things is not like the others..."

Call me old-fashioned, but I think if you're going to refer to an area of research as a field, it should probably have more than just you in it. Otherwise you risk being just another lonely laborer out standing in his field. Sure, you can define a field, and that's bold and important work, but it's also usually best done post-tenure. In fact, her field wasn't really so much an area of research as the resulting mashup combining what she had studied in graduate school with what she liked to do now.

I asked her whether she had considered writing about something a bit more accessible. Something -- perhaps -- that a university press might actually be able to list in its catalogue and sell. She sighed. "But this is what I'm trained in. It's my expertise." She held on to her topic, and who knows? Maybe she will find a home for it, though I don't see how. But what I do question big-picture is how hard it would be to take some post-doctoral courses at (for example) Johns Hopkins that is just an hour away, and branch into a second area of expertise that more clearly connects her to a recognized field. I'm not saying she needs to give up what she loves, but rather it seems she is defining "her field" so narrowly that she can't quite imagine doing anything else. And is she really an expert? Her qualifications at present are quite slim -- just a few graduate courses, and a dissertation. Why can't this change, expand, grow?

Many scholars choose a number of areas in which to educate themselves as experts. A doctorate is hardly a badge of perfection in any field. As some of my advisors liked to say, it's just a union card.

Photo above of a woman out standing in her field taken from Somebody's blog.