I am looking forward to giving a minor assist with this program, hosted by the delightful Anshu Johri who’s work I know from Play on Words, where she both reads (as an actor) and is read (her work by others). (I’ll be reading the Japanese originals for three poems translated into Hindi.) 8pm on Sep 26. Email bauchhaar@gmail.com for an invite!
This iteration of Perfectly Queer reading series features two authors I’ve read before, Jim Provenzano and Rob Rosen. Via Zoom Tuesday, September 29, 7pm to 8:15pm.
And now it’s live! Oyster River Pages is up, including my story “Scarce Adjusted in the Tomb” among a host of wonderful stuff from many genres. I am already well into reading through it–starting with fiction, as I do–and finding so many great reads. I may even start hopping around into the poetry and non-fiction, just out of curiosity, before I get to the end of fiction, because I have a hankering. So many words, so little time.
A story that appeared on the page many years ago in a very different incarnation for the fiction workshop at Stanford’s Continuing Studies has found a home! “Scarce Adjusted in the Tomb ” will appear this September in Oyster River Pages. This is especially welcome news in that I’ve become a professor again–teaching a graduate course at Kent State–so writing really hasn’t got the attention I want it to. (My writing activity has mainly been focused on the rewrite of The Wealthy Whites of Williamsburg, last year’s NaNoWriMo effort.)
The latest iteration of “Scarce” is darker than any yet, completely eschewing a traditional happy ending (Go ahead: Don’t grow! Run away!)–so I am amazed it didn’t provoke the opposite response–turning away in disgust. But it’s nagged at me all these years so I guess it nagged at someone else as well!
Thanks again to Julia Halprin Jackson, Melinda Marks and Nicole Hughes for putting on another wonderful afternoon of readings at Play On Words’ second appearance at the San José Museum of Art in downtown San José. I guess I have been at this long enough that I am able to focus on the readings that come before mine (also a function of the fact that the readings are by actors, not authors?). Great crop of work, folks!
That includes the Museum’s Robin Treen and Frederick Liang, videographer Ryan Alpers and photographer Branden Frederick. Plus authors Anshu Johri (who was also a reader), Ann Hillesland (who has a new book out!), Marilyn Horn, Gerardo Pacheco Matus ( great to meet you!), Mairead Brodie, Jody Ulate, Tania Martin (of Flash Fiction Forum fame), Arcadia Conrad (another double winner–er, not in the 12-step sense), Leah Griesmann, and E.D.Southard. And nothing beats having your piece read by an actor. Many thanks also to Peter Ray Juarez, Muse Lee, Melinda Marks, Ronald Feichtmeir, and Erin Southard.
Finally, it was an honor to have my piece, read with brio by Keenan Flagg, close the show. The piece was a stripped down version of “Because of Course: An Award-winning Story” (yes, that’s the title), a meta-fiction that appeared last summer in Tahoma Literary Review. And the expanded version is entering final edits. Yes, it has turned into a novel: The Wealthy Whites of Williamsburg. Coming in 2021 or 2022 to this site, if I can get my act together on self-publishing?
The drama in the workshop was not in my mind! I gave a “waiter” a ride to the airport and she gave me the skinny on an interpersonal drama taking place. It had nothing to do with me not understanding that one piece. Lesson made available (I will not say learned): off behavior in one’s proximity is rarely about you. (Exception: If you suspect someone treating you oddly is homophobic–no eye contact, refusal to engage anything you say while enthusiastically engaging the straight people in the vicinity–they probably are. Beware the gaslight.)
So as I leave I commit myself to doing the persistent thing: I will contact the agents, the editors, etc., I will submit work, I will show up for events, I will communicate with people I have met here. What I don’t come away with is optimism. I’ve been through the mill already, and one big lesson here has been that sometimes it’s time to move on. It’s been wonderful to be taken seriously by people I respect, and who are way more accomplished than I am. But the reality is there are many voices fighting for the light (here, voices are plants larded with chlorophyll, waiting to grow). Mine is a niche voice, with a not-so-profitable audience.
But I like it.
I like to write. I don’t think I was deluded about Red Dot; I think I was happy with it! It’s a fun book and I could tell other people enjoyed it and that really floats my boat! The actual writing, that keeps my hope alive. That’s where I am optimistic. I can produce the books I want to read but cannot find. So… maybe I really do channel my time and energy into a more practical direction: self publishing. After all, light falls everywhere, and there is no reason I can’t grab some too.
Oh yeah, a tad exhausted. All the workshops are over, I’ve stalked the reception desk waiting for the new delivery of Vermont maple syrup to take home for Tom, it’s arrived and been mailed, as have postcards to my writing group, many more conversations have been had. Pages have been dispatched, duty-free Toblerone consumed. (I arrived with a stash of nuts to snack on, which has been invaluable. The snacks provided are fresh fruit, which normally would be great, but apparently I have recently become fructose intolerant, so I can’t have any. I will discover when I get home that I have lost six pounds.)
Being here has been steadily improving day by day and I am happy I came. Thanks for encouraging me, everyone. (I banish thoughts of the credit card bill from my mind.) Tonight’s dinner has been consumed and my dining companions are gone. I am enjoying doing nothing. It has been a lot of work. The amount of effort that goes into this is considerable for participants and organizers. And I am not blowing off tonight’s final reading. The last reading to this point was an afternoon session of contributors–46 participants back to back, one minute each. Was great. Of course, there seems to have been a wee bit of drama in the workshop–did I offend two of the other writers? There was one piece that I just did not get. Not at all. I think I was the only one. Damn, I tried on that one! I am hoping this is in my mind.
So, this has been entertaining. This has been great. And I wouldn’t do it again.
Unless I would.
I had my workshop. All went well. Red Dot has some fans! The feedback was consistent, clear and doable. Very positive–almost scarily so–with no major issues. The way forward is clear and not fraught. That was fun! I later had my one-on-one meeting with Ana Menéndez, and that was great as well. Maybe I am being too relaxed. Later, when I get home, I will go over the feedback and realize one person really didn’t like Red Dot, and I completely missed that. This is so odd: normally I latch onto the criticisms, but here I am finding this so pleasant I am likely deluded. Still, pleasant!
I also had my fifteen minutes with the agent. I talked with her extensively about the India book. I told her about the others, too, but she came back to that time after time. It caught her interest, while also being unsalable. Her idea: treatment for a Netflix India series. That’s certainly an original and smart idea. The down side: It would be a lot of work, on spec, with an extremely poor chance of success. Much as I admire people who commit to that, I am getting up there in years and a key question is how do I want to spend my time?
So that’s where we are now. I am doing wash and the reading is in three hours. The reading has kept me up for several nights, but now I feel ready.
The reading just ended. I went first, with the opening of “Do You Have A Plan,” rewritten twelve times or so. I made use of the lessons of Patrick Donnelly’s session on reading your own work: be louder than you think you need to be, you are there to be interesting to the listeners, use your finger to track your position on the page so you can look up and then back down at the page, DO look up every so often, say your own name clearly, remember that no one is really listening for the first six seconds or so (I used that to do a mini intro of the piece), try to engage both the chest register and the head register (I think my nasal register is largely absent, the opposite of what I had expected). I was well rehearsed, having nearly memorized the piece.
It went great. People laughed at the right spots. Someone even gasped at one point. I could have looked up more, as always, but the applause sounded so genuine and loud and kept going on. Are you kidding me? I had been worried about being boring, and now this? I became embarrassed by it and cut it off by introducing the fabulous Celeste Chan, who followed me. I then got to sit down. Having read already, I was able to take in everyone else’s reading. I’ve met most of the readers, and by meet I mean had a chance to really talk to. I guess I really gravitated toward the other LGBTQ+ people without realizing it. So much good stuff. This was so fun to be a part of. The highlight of the conference for me, for sure, to be part of this event with these people. On cloud nine.
I feel much more welcomed. There are still the same hierarchies and competitive layers (all very explicit, which honestly makes it much more OK), but being part of that group, and so well received, was heartwarming. The crowd size was close to 200. It was the one reading for “contributors” (that’s the lowest rung) that also included “fellows” (2) and “scholars” (1? 2? 3?). No, wait, the people of color reading tomorrow will also be like that. I did not expect that I would put so little mental energy into the pages I brought to workshop (literally no real worries) and so much mental energy (literally waking up at 3AM sweating that I would embarrass myself by with three minutes of boring, forrgettable prose) into these three minutes: Rewriting, retyping, taking the class on speaking your work, rewriting, reading aloud out on the grass, in our room, sitting on a washing machine, rewriting. And rewriting. And, shockingly, I was almost comfortable up there, performing. It feels more important than the agent/editor meetings.
We have two more days of workshops, with two big-name readings and a dinner, then done. Lots more work to do—getting up early to go over other people’s manuscripts again tomorrow and the next day!!!!
OK, OK, pulled that situation back. I found the small-press editor at breakfast and apologized. We had the meeting over scrambled eggs. It was good, relaxed. I’m not rested, but maybe being rested fries my brain. But there is something else going on. Am I too relaxed? My roommate said he would introduce me to his agent. Of course I said yes. But I am not jumping up and down inside. I think I maybe genuinely would rather do this–book production and sales–myself. I kind of think I could do a really good job at it. Publishing, that is.
Also, I did tell the editor about the explicit sex in my book, why it was there, and asked if I would fare better by removing it. I expected him to say yes. He said no. It was an interesting discussion that I have wanted to have with a book editor for a long while.
One way of looking at the editor meeting today is that he passed on all three books. Disappointing. And when I look at their book list, I don’t know why I chose him. I think it was because you can’t submit without an invitation, so this was my only way to get one. Only it wasn’t.
On the other hand, I really got a lot of behind the scenes questions answered. Another answer was that Criminals would interest him if it was more of a thriller. And from my end, that I don’t know where I would throw a dead body, so I would rather write a new thriller from scratch—if I were to do that. (Would probably take the same time and be better.) Those long-term answers have lasting value. Less second guessing going forward?
Fireworks? What fireworks are these? I hear fireworks from my sweltering top-floor room (uncooled, and less importantly at the moment, unheated) but cannot see the explosions.
I now feel the conference is more gold than dross–a switch from the early days, when the simultaneous sameness/alienness was hard to rise above–though the vast bulk is in between: using your noggin to learn things. Mainly in the workshop with Anna Menéndez and fellow Deepak Unnikrishnan, who have turned out to be the perfect match for me. Anna Menéndez is a dead ringer for a good friend of mine, so much so that I have to keep telling myself she is not Petra. Deepak Unnikrishnan is of Indian background but grew up and lives in Dubai, making me wish I had submitted pages from my India novel, or at least a short story set in the Gulf, of which I have two in a drawer somewhere. Hang on–the pages I submitted WERE set in India. So the folks matching writers with workshops have done a great job. Reading about them before coming, they seemed too perfect, so it’s a surprise to find that they actually are. I’m very excited. Both write in the same multinational drift that I do, and both laughed when I said that in the throes of graduate school I used to go to the airport and hang out to relax. After a good night of sleep, things are better.
Today I am seeing that, though the hierarchies and challenges are as I described, this is also a reflection of the ways we have available to put together a writing life. The academic way predominates, but many other ways are present as well, and inside the writers’ heads perhaps the differences are less stark. There is some pretty telling pressure to be positive. Love you, love your work.
OK, off to the 23rd reading of the conference, 10pm in the barn!
Oops. Got so wrapped up in trying to print my pages for the reading–which meant retyping them from scratch–that I missed my editor appointment. I think I actually walked right by the guy–an editor from a small press–at more or less the right time. I thought it was tomorrow. Perhaps a subliminal message from the old psyche: I am just pretending to have hope. I also talked informally (seated next to each other at a reading) to the agent I will be meeting later and I was not nervous at all. It was pleasant because at heart I know it doesn’t matter. Maybe this is what I’ve really come here to learn.
Yeah, I don’t like the sound of that at all. Pleasant: good. No mattering: not good.