River of Play

Global Schooner

Head over to the Prairie Schooner blog. The Global Schooner App should go live today. 

And it's free. So go clicking already.

The Spring issue cover

Ten Years of Anthologizing

The first week of April was the official rollout of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize 10th Anniversary Reader. The good people at the journal met with the good people of the University of Nebraska Press to have a lovely celebration.

At least, I’m told it was lovely. Alaska’s a long commute. And expensive.

But there’s a story here about university publishing that might be useful.

The lovely cover

While we were in the midst of the 8th book prize contest, I emailed an editor at UNP, Kristen Elias Rowley. We met for coffee at The Mill and discussed what might need to happen to make an anniversary edition work. What was important to the Press was timing. And I had come to them at the right time: two years was a good lead time. Still is.

I put together a proposal. They accepted it. I started to put the book together and then got a job offer in Alaska. Could I keep both ‘askas happy? My replacement at Prairie Schooner

took up the rest of the task by narrowing selections from the most recent books, and we had a short conversation to confirm our choices.

So the two years timeline is good, but we had an advantage in the fact that UNP had published the books and had permissions and digital files all lined up.

Here’s the “too long, didn’t read” version: publishing takes time. Plan for it!

The Annual Barbaric AWP

AWP season never ends. They start taking proposals about a week after the conference ends, then book fair reservations start, and then the hotels open. A wearying ouroboros.

But also quite fun.

The Seattle AWP will be my tenth, but I have friends who remember when under a hundred people were getting together for the conference. Can that be right?

There’s a flurry of activity up here for panel organization. We are finally part of the regional interest. And we’re interested in being interested. I know because pretty much every writer I know here is planning on attending.

Of course, plans and actual attendance are two different things. Because even though Seattle is the next airport south of Anchorage (actually, that would be Hawaii, but work with me), it’s still over two thousand miles away. We think about that a lot.

Book Fair at Boston

 

Before we moved up here, we told friends and colleagues that moving to Alaska in the 21^st century isn’t like moving to Alaska in the 20^th century. And we’ve been right about that. We have serviceable internet, so that makes up for a lot of distance. Skype, cell phones, Amazon, moose, lynx, wolves—we’ve got it all, baby.

But we’re still a long, long way from the Lower 48.

Mostly, that fact is easy to ignore. We go on our own strange way and ignore the rest of the country. But we do try to be part of the conversation, which is where AWP comes in. We have this feeling that we’re easy to ignore even as reality television programming keeps adding Alaska content. So we’ll wave our hands and see who stops by to listen.

And remember: proposals are due by May 1.

Organizer tip: Read the proposal book and successful descriptions
!

Backwards and Forwards

Books, that is, looking both ways.

My brother recently asked me what I was thinking about the future of books, and I keep revising my answer. As I write this, I'm having a hard time not hitting backspace (in part, of course, because of my rudimentary typing skills). 

So while I ponder (key pondering points: small publishers might be in good positions, authors are far more free to pursue their visions, books won't die but their formats will change), I thought I'd drop a link to Jeremy Greenfield and his ideas about digital book start-ups. And the large number of them is why I keep my pinky trained for the delete key.

 

Punctuated Migration

I wrote an essay/meditation/scholarly piece a few years back about punctuated migration, the contemporary practice of moving every few years (once a decade, maybe) that might well start in childhood. This situation sets those of us interested in place-based writing into a strange situation: if we’re not a dirt elite (been on one piece of land for generations), then how can we write while holding any kind of claim to the place? My argument boils down to respect and openness, a listening curiosity.

In the piece, I argue that we take our places with us, but we—that is, anyone interested in the pattern of punctuated migration while maintaining place-based interests—must avoid letting those places from our past overwhelm the present. We need to let the new places speak clearly. That attitude is especially important in my role (now, not so new) as an editor, and there’s something about this place, Alaska, that has a lot to listen to.

I count myself lucky, of course, that so much of that conversation comes into my office. It’s a unique experience, I think, for a cheechako moving up to learn so much about the place so quickly. And from so many different directions: poetry, snow science, history, geography… The list goes on.

The next step, though, is connecting back. What did those other places, those other landscapes, people, and his history give to me that I can take into this place? I’m beginning to develop some answers. I’ve been thinking a lot about agriculture and Alaska, and about the complicated sense of being overlooked while also being criticized. So I’ve imported some of the Midwest and Appalachia, but I’m always looking for how Alaska diverges from where I’ve been, trying to hear the place on its own.

Here’s the difficult part of the listening: Alaska is simply too large to contain. As someone in the Interior, I don’t have access to the ocean. Or the oil fields to the north. We get far less snow than the Gulf, and we’re not even close to the amount of rainfall the rain forests get. In short, still a lot of listening to be done.

From the Desk

My to do list today is short, just two items. One is a joyful thing that will take a lot of time, the other is one of the great sadnesses of the job. The latter is, of course, writing rejection notes. I think editors keep trying to let this cat out of the bag, and either it's shy--the cat--or it has vanished, but for real and for true, we want to love everything that comes across our desk. It's why we got into the business--or stayed.

The other task, and another reason for staying, is developmental editing. For me, at least, working on the Big Issues of a book is just...fun. I don't have copyeding in my blood (you can ask my former students), but thinking about a whole book is just a delight. I'm lucky, too, in that I can do that kind of editing. I get the feeling that most acquisitions people don't get a chance to do that. So I might be at the edge of nowhere, but it's an edge with great ideas and words that need wrangling.

I'd like to send you over to this post over an editor's blog that I like. I don't know Jamie Chavez, but she's right on in this post.