Perfect for Mother's Day: the Baby Be of Use series or The Secret Language of Sleep. - - - - |
Dave did an interview a few weeks ago, on The New Yorker website, that covered a lot of the themes of the new book, so we chose questions from those sent by readers that didn't overlap too much with that interview. We also grouped them according to similar subject matter. Many of them cover the process of publishing a book like this through McSweeney's. If you find yourself reading about, say, the book being published in England, and you don't care about the book being published in England, please feel free to skip to whatever seems more interesting. — Eli Horowitz, managing editor, McSweeney's - - - - Q: Why all the mystery surrounding the title of your new book? A: There was no good reason at all. I just thought the title should come out the same time as the book. Probably a dumb idea. The title is You Shall Know Our Velocity. - - - - Q: How's the family? I don't want to pry too much, but we did come to know your family with your first book, so it's natural to wonder how everyone's doing. Did you finally get a dog? A: People have been really good to us. I think generally as humans we understand or assume that the world is full of generous and huge-hearted people, but you don't really know it first-hand until you get letters from strangers who are truly concerned about the welfare of your family. It just knocks you over, how kind people are. A lot of people share their own family stories with me, and man, some of these letters… well, every story is sadder than the last. There were a lot of times over the last couple years when these letters, from people I might never meet, really gave us strength. A lot of people, total strangers, wrote extremely kind notes after my sister died last year, and that meant a lot to us. It was such a hard year. There are times when my brothers and I just look around and can't believe there's only three of us left. You really can't do the math, or you'd lose your mind. But we're doing well. Bill's in D.C. writing and consulting, and Toph will be a sophomore in college this fall, and we're happy to be back in California. No dog yet, though. - - - - Q: I read about this 826 Valencia tutoring thing. What's the story — what are you guys teaching, who are the kids, how old are they, do you know what you're doing, etc? I thought these kids today only wanted to play Crazy Taxi. A: The kids are all over the map, age-wise, and in terms of their needs, and that makes it really different every day. Our days are strange sometimes, where we're doing a field trip with first graders in the morning — they play in the pirate store and we tell them stories in costume (usually this guy Ian dressed up as a pirate), and then they put together a booklet relating to their curriculum — and in the afternoon we've got drop-ins working on papers, and right after that our classes start. So we start with twenty 6- and 7-year-olds trying to find out if Ian's real, asking where his treasure is, pulling on his eyepatch, all that, and we end with fifteen 12-year-olds learning advanced comic-making techniques. It's a strange place sometimes, but we knew it would have to be strange, to be a place kids would come on their own. I didn't answer the other question yet. No, I hadn't taught anyone, besides my brother, since I was a camp counselor. We're focusing on 18-and-under students because that's where the need's the greatest, basically. The college kids in San Francisco are pretty well-served, comparatively. But obviously the whole story is told better on the 826 website. - - - - Q: Where do you get your tutors for 826 Valencia? Am I underqualified? I went in there to get an application a while ago, but the woman (Yosh?) at the front said you weren't accepting any new tutors. A: We are again! You should apply. When we opened up last spring, we just had too many applicants. The schoolyear was ending, and between our regular staff and interns, we could already handle, pretty easily, the number of students who were coming in for drop-in help, which was pretty small some days. But over the summer the word starting getting around, so now there are a lot of kids in every day, and the demand for help has jumped. So the fall will be very different, much busier. This week we're interviewing another 80 or so tutors, so we'll be ready. A good majority of the tutors come from the writing and editing community of San Francisco — about a third of them from within walking distance — and it's really a testament to the volunteer spirit out here. We've got all kinds of people, though — a guy I interviewed last week is a dispatcher for a piano moving company. (He says they move twenty pianos a day. Did you have any idea? I made him swear they were that busy.) Anyway, we do need more people now, because we started out thinking we'd just host kids at 826, but now we'll be going into schools, in large groups of tutors, to work on papers, and in the fall, tons of college entrance essays. Anyone with flexible hours during the day should sign up. - - - - Q: Over the years, has your vision for what McSweeney's should be evolved? If so, how? What are your hopes and plans for the future of McSweeney's? A: It's changed a lot over three years, or however long it's been since we started. Not that we've ever had any real idea what we're doing. In terms of what we look to publish, our tastes have evolved issue to issue, but it's been driven by what comes to us through the mail — that has the single greatest effect on what we do. We let the issues get shaped by the individual pieces in it, basically, rather than the other way around. But early on, we might have been more inclined to publish something experimental though unsuccessful over something traditional but well-executed. We valued the experiment above all, really, and were a little form-obsessed. But now we're more balanced, I would say. But it's always changing. For Issue 9, we started out with some pieces we'd already accepted that were set in disparate places — Central America, Nepal, Kuwait — so when we were rounding out the issue, stories taking place in calamitous locales were favored. This whole issue has an urgency to it that felt right, a departure from where we started out, as a magazine more decidedly oblivious to its time and place. - - - - Q: The word "American" appears often in American literary chat. Do you
consider your work being about American Dream/Sadness/Masculinity/ Culture/Life etc.? Is your new book about American Something? A: I think any American who writes anything, on some level, thinks they're writing something uniquely American — from a perspective that speaks from and about the experience of being American. But maybe that's a sham. When you start thinking you're writing that's contemporary and American, you have to ask yourself, Is this really uniquely American? And at that point it's sometimes hard to pinpoint what makes it that way. Usually we're kidding ourselves. - - - - Q: It said on the New Yorker website that this new book of yours was written after you abandoned a previous book. Does that mean this one was written very quickly? Your first book came out only two years ago. A: I don't know, really, how long this took to write. It seemed like a long time. But I did the research for the book a while ago, almost two years ago, so it's been in my head for a long time. Two years is an eternity. - - - - Q: What is it about Saul Bellow that you like so much? How do you think reading him while you are writing translates, if at all, in your work? A: I would guess anyone who writes has someone who they read more than any other writer, and whose work hits them hardest. I have no explanation for why Bellow's work hits me harder than anyone else's, because I don't have much in common with any of his protagonists, outside of being from the Chicago area — and I think some kind of shared experience or identification brings your connection to a book to a different level. But all I can say is the rhythm of his sentences is the rhythm that I would aspire to, and the scope and depth of his knowledge is the scope and depth I would aspire to, and the way he weaves the two together, while describing the world and the life of the mind, is, I think, unparalleled. He makes symphonic music of it all, and I don't know anyone else who quite does that, sentence by sentence, page by page. - - - - Q: After your first book we have been anxiously awaiting what your new book is going to be about in the hope that you will be forced to write a real
piece of fiction, as opposed to your first book that was mostly
autobiographical. Turns out that your second book is also mostly about
your own experiences — at least, as I understand, you did go around the
world? Are you the kind of writer that writes only about his own life? Have you tried to write anything totally out of your head? Explain yourself. A: This new book is fiction. I might have given the wrong idea on the New Yorker site, I guess. The book is a novel about two people who do not exist, doing things that never happened. I did do some research for the book, as anyone would. I wanted them to go to Senegal, so I went to Senegal to do research. I could, I guess, write about Senegal or Morocco without having gone there, but I'm not sure how convincing it would be. If by "totally out of your head" you mean something not based on humans and actual places in the world, no, I haven't tried that yet. I like reading science fiction, but I don't know if I'd be so good at writing it. - - - - Q: Word on the street is that this book will be only available in independent bookstores. Is that true? Is that even legal? Isn't that unfair competition or something? What about Amazon? A: I think it actually might be illegal to prevent stores from carrying something. Someone told us that, but I don't know. Either way, the book will be available only in independent stores, because they're the guys who order the vast majority of the McSwys books, so they get first dibs on everything we publish. In this case, there was a relatively small print run, and they ordered all the copies right away, god bless them, so that was that. We'll have a complete list of stores on the site soon, and I'll be going to as many of the stores as I can, for signings or readings, in the next couple months. As for Amazon, we decided this time to experiment with having this book available through our website only. We figured if people were ordering it online, they might as well order it from us. Other books we're involved with will be in the chains and on Amazon, of course. The Best American Nonrequired Reading will be just about anywhere, I imagine, and Dixon's book is on Amazon and in the chains, to some degree. Issue 10 of McSweeney's will be all over the place, too, because we need to get that book to everyone. It sort of depends on the book. We leave it up to the authors — with some books, you need to make it available every which way you can. With my book, we're planning to keep it smaller. - - - - Q: Salinger once wrote that anonymity is one of the greatest gifts a
writer has. How important is laying low for a writer? A: You really should be able to act however you want, right? — without penalty for being either very shy or very public. The work should stand alone and apart, but unfortunately that's rarely how it's seen. If a writer happens to like touring, meeting readers, talking about books on TV, whatever, in some circles that's seen as diminishing of their work in some way. The idea that writers are hermetic and quiet by nature is widely accepted, but limiting and kind of silly. There are some people who write about books who are very hermetic themselves, and they seem to really get annoyed when writers of books don't mind going to doing readings and meeting people, or are friendly in general. I did a reading about six months ago in Dallas, and we really had a fun time, the audience was so warm, and everyone laughed a lot, but there was some guy from the local newspaper there, and he wrote about the event the next day as if it was some kind of bad thing that the audience and I would dare to have fun at a reading. It was just bizarre. When there's one unhappy or confused person among hundreds of happy and unconfused people, and he's somehow allowed to speak for everyone, it's just a shame. Guys like this call book tours "promotional junkets," and talking with readers "gladhanding." If you're any good at reading your work, you're a "showman." I guess in general it would be nice if these people just relaxed a little bit. That said, I'll double-back and say that I am at the point, and have been at the point for two years now, where I get a queasy feeling every time I see my name in print. Anonymity would be a dream. We thought about publishing this book under a pseudonym, or maybe just printing one or two copies of it. We had a local bookbindery ready to print the one copy. But then we built 826, and realized this would be the only way to pay for it, basically, so here we are. - - - - Q: My question has more to do with the upcoming McSweeney's books listed on the site. I note that of the three listed, two of them are by Canadians, while the third is by someone who spent a lot of time in Canada. Did you intend to do more for Canadian arts and literature than our own publishing houses, or is this a happy accident? A: That's a weird thing with the Canadians. I have no explanation for that. It's strange that Marcel Dzama and Sheila Heti are both Canadian, and both so young — I think they're both 25 or so — and they've both created extremely vivid, inimitable sorts of worlds with their art, each borrowing from children's stories and then darkening them considerably. But per capita, Canada has always produced more and better artists, right? Maybe that's just my impression. - - - - Q: We have not heard very much about this book, is this because there is
something new and suprising about it? Perhaps the pages are made out of
glass? I would very much like that. A: I think we might try to make some of the pages out of glass. Maybe a small portion of the run will be made from glass. Thank you for this. - - - - Q: If you're publishing your new book independently, why are you letting Vintage publish Issue 10 of McSweeney's? A: Because it'll keep 826 Valencia functioning for a year, maybe two. McSweeney's will be putting out the issue for subscribers in December or early January, and only after that will Vintage publish their edition — in the early spring, I think. A while back, Michael Chabon was talking about how he'd always dreamed of having his own magazine, one that would publish genre stories — crime, ghost stories, science fiction, Westerns — so I asked him if he'd want to try out the idea on an issue of McSweeney's. Pretty soon he had such a ludicrous lineup of writers that we knew the readership would be greater than our usual, smaller McSwys readership. At the same time, we found ourselves in a tight spot at 826 Valencia, where we'd spent more than we'd planned getting the building ready and the equipment bought and set up and all these surprise expenses covered, so money was getting really tight. At some point Barb and Eli at our offices out here had the idea that we'd sell Vintage the right to sell that issue of McSwys as a regular paperback book — it was in the populist spirit of the old genre magazines, after all — and all the money for the advance and royalties, etc, would go directly to our sponsoring nonprofit, Youth Speaks, to cover our costs and some of theirs. It's worked out really well — this book will likely keep 826 Valencia afloat for a year or more, and enables us to give more college scholarships, to send more tutors to schools, and possibly hire another full-time teacher. We really owe it to Chabon, who's doing it all for free, and the contributing writers, who are being paid very little. They all cheerfully agreed to help out, and it means the world to 826 and Youth Speaks. - - - - Q: Will your book be published in England? Will you come to England on the book tour? A: Penguin is publishing the book in England in January, I think. The Chabon issue of McSwys will be published by Penguin, too. Penguin did Nick Hornby's Speaking with the Angel collection, which raised a lot of money for TreeHouse, Nick's son's school for autistic kids. (That collection probably gave us the idea for ours.) So when we were looking for a publisher for our own benefit collection, we went to Penguin, and then it just made sense to go with them for my book, too. As for a tour, I don't know. I'd love to at some point but traveling is harder now with 826 going. - - - - Q: Hey Dave, how would you like to come do a reading from your new book at an Air Force base in cold Lake Alberta?? A: Yes. - - - - Q: Why hair, rather than its opposite? A: No. - - - - Q: Do you edit as you write? Do you vomit-write and then go back and edit? How many drafts did you go through, and how many readers did you trust to give you feedback? When do you know you're done? A: I do all of those things. I write in huge bursts, and then go back and fiddle. I'm not very regular, in terms of routine. There are weeks when I write nothing, and weeks when I write 10 hours a day. I usually go through about 15-20 drafts on anything I do, printing it every time, making marks, inputting the marks, printing it again, reading it in a different place — different room, bus, beach, whatever. When the pages seem to make some sense, I give them to someone else, at which point they tell me it makes no sense. Then I go back and do ten more drafts. I always think I know when I'm done, but I'm only sure I'm done when someone else tells me I'm done. After 20 drafts, you're just not the best judge of your own work. - - - - Q: Interesting that, while a "sprawling" style so defines your writing (my
sense — and I'm not sure why — is that AHWOSG, which I enjoyed very much, was written quickly, in free-form, with little pruning thereafter), you also (as editor of McSweeney's) presumably take it upon yourself to ask other writers to "rein it in" and advise them, "less of this, more of that."
Forgive my asking, but could you be compensating for your reluctance to
rigorously edit your own work by editing other people's work instead? (And
since the new novel will be self-published, what was the editing process
like this time around?) A: Yikes. Hmm. As an editor I think I'm definitely much harder on myself than I am on anyone else. McSweeney's has never been a tough place for a writer to get edited, really — the m.o. here is really to let writers be, to fool around a little, take a chance. About self-editing this time around: it wasn't all that different of a process from the first time around. When you're with a regular publishing house, you get help from your editor there, but also from friends; you need five or six opinions, I think. So I still got the five or six opinions, just outside of the auspices of the publishing house. - - - - Q: Are you doing interviews and everything for this book? Seemed like last time around you were everywhere for a while. A: Last time around, Geoff Kloske, my editor at Simon & Schuster, made me promise to help do publicity for the book. He gave me an advance that allowed me to quit my job, and he did that based on a few pages of notes I'd sent him. I was really grateful to him because he took a huge chance on me based on his instincts and courage, and the trade-off was that I'd do interviews to help them sell the books and make their money back. So I did a lot of interviews. I honestly didn't know I was allowed to say no to people. But this time I have to. It's just too much pressure to deal with while trying to concentrate on everything at 826. If it turns weird like it did last time around, and we all get distracted trying to correct the record all the time, we won't have time to run the center well, so we're just gonna bow out quietly this time around. - - - - Q: Will you have the ability to print more copies if there's demand for them? What if it becomes a best-seller? A: We're not printing enough copies for it to be a bestseller. If we sell all of the copies we printed initially, we could conceivably print more. We'll see what happens. We're really just hoping to get the book into the hands of those who want to read it, and then call it a day and move onto the next McSwys book. Sheila Heti's The Middle Stories is next, and I really think she deserves some attention. Then Marcel Dzama. Then we hope to have William T. Vollmann's Rising Up and Rising Down ready sometime in the spring. We'll see. That one is a huge, huge undertaking for all of us, and the timeline for that book is still a little in flux. - - - - Q: This is an easy one, but I'm always interested in what other writers are reading. Any other new books you'd recommend? I've been a little out of it for a while, because I've been reading lots of old stuff about the Lincoln-Douglas debates. (I recommend those.) As for newer stuff: Tom Vanderbilt wrote a book called Survival City that just came out, and it's fantastic — about the physical remnants of the Cold War. That should be read by everyone, for the same reasons Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation is being widely read. Have you read Javier Marias? I've just been discovering him, and he's just incredible. There's also that book I mentioned earlier, Hobo by Eddy Joe Cotton, that's one of the most electric things I've read in years. One of our tutors at 826 Valencia, Stephen Elliot, wrote a book called A Life Without Consequences that should be read, especially by anyone who loves JT LeRoy's stuff. Arthur Bradford's Dogwalker is out in paperback soon, and I'd recommend that book to anyone. Lydia Davis's Samuel Johnson Is Indignant is out soon in paperback, too. And A.M. Homes and Gabe Hudson have collections coming out in September, and those guys are doing insanely good work. Can't believe how many really huge, meaty stories Homes has in that book. And I've heard the very best things about Eugenides's new book, Middlesex, if you'll take a second-hand recommendation — I haven't read it yet. There's just a ton of great stuff out there right now and in the next few months. Rick Moody's The Black Veil is brilliant. Anyone who actually reads it will know this. People like Moody, who really reach and take great risks, should be rewarded, rather than punished (and he was, by some) for whatever shortcomings people see in their work. It's a strange time in books, you know, where skilled experimentation is not only discouraged, it's being bullied completely out of the arena. And that just can't be tolerated. Moody is obviously a guy with virtuosic talent, so why not give him a little space? Not that Moody's work is all that similar, but what would happen if Barth, Barthelme, Pynchon, Millhauser or even Dos Passos debuted today? They'd all be called pretentious or fussy or cold. It's scary to think of the beating they'd get. It's time, I think, that the critical community embrace the idea of pluralism in books — where very different approaches can co-exist, and where artistic diversity is honored, and where great risks are encouraged. If the risk pays off, give them credit; if it doesn't, certainly you can't come down harder than you would on someone who's not even making an effort to expand the boundaries of the form. (I'm babbling all this, by the way, while admitting that my new book isn't nearly as daring as Moody's, or Lydia Davis's last book, or Danielewski's, or anywhere near the level of anything by Ann Carson. With You Shall Know Our Velocity, I had a straightforward story to tell, and did it in a fairly straightforward way.) - - - - Q: Perhaps I spend too much time on the Internet, but there's a thing on the Webb-Waring Institute website about a trip they're taking to Kiliminjaro, to hike up the mountain for cancer research. There's a man on that trip with your name. It's not you, is it? I don't know if I think of you as a mountain-climbing type. A: They told me it wouldn't be a climb-climb — that's why I'm going. Webb-Waring is a place I really believe in, and my family's been able to help them a bit. I even got a tour of the labs once, and they tried to get me to kill one of their lab rats. They really did. I'd been there for twenty minutes, and they had to do an experiment on a rat, and they acted like it was fun, or an honor or something, for me to get to suffocate the thing, or inject it — I forget how it was I was supposed to kill it, but I thought they were nuts. All these guys in white coats giving me the honors. But I love those guys. They do great work and they're truly this close-knit family of researchers, so I agreed to do the climb with them. As far as I know, it's just a week-long hike, without any of the pickaxes or ropes or carabiners. If you know otherwise, definitely let me know, because I don't know anything about that kind of mountain-climbing stuff. I do have new boots, though, so I'm hoping I'm set. |
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