Victorine, novel (Pantheon, New York, 2004) Breakup, memoir (Doubleday, New Yorl, 1998) Panic Blood, novel (Viking, New York, 1990) Love Me Tender, novel (Penguin, New York, 1987) Chloé l'Atlantique, novel, written in French (Ramsay, Paris, 1984)
The PEN banned books trailer popping on the screen of the Standard High Line Room on Wednesday night was particularly appropriate to the theme of How to Start a Revolution in the Library: Authors defect from corporate publishing. With a mock-sinister tone, the panelists accused major publishers to censor, or at the very least, to smother writers voices by simply refusing to publish them. Lisa Dierbeck, of independent press Mischief & Mayhem (that she co-edits with Dale Peck) was moderating. She slipped a striped tie as a noose around her neck, and played the role of The Man, CEO of a major publishing corporation, power-tripping with his private chauffeured car and a big summer house upstate, a.k.a. the corporate villain. The rest of the panel, writers Monika Zgustova, (from Czechoslovakia), Carmen Bullosa (from Mexico), Mykola Riabchuk (Ukraine) Ben Greenman (day job: editor at The New Yorker) Dale Peck (novelist and co-editor of Mischief & Mayhem) and editor Amy Scholder (The Feminist Press) were The Enemy.
But actually, only Amy Scholder was The Enemy, since she was the only full time editor of the panel, and she wasn’t very virulent, as she acknowledged that writers like Sapphire, whom she discovered, went on to do fantastically well with major publishers, and that, actually, the norm is that writers defect to commercial houses, not the other way around! The other panelists were writers with various degrees of bad experiences and sad tales with The Man, Dale Peck being the more vitriolic, and the more entertaining. He had a certain amount of glee recounting his censorship tale with FSG. About a character in one of his novels who looked a lot like Susan Sontag he had written: “and she wasn’t a lesbian,” a line that didn’t pass muster with The Man, and got the ax.
The saddest tale was the one recounted by Monika Zgustova, about an experimental Czech writer who was very well regarded by Prague literary circles but couldn’t get published in communist Czechoslovakia; so when he emigrated in Switzerland, he had high hopes to finally get recognition in the West, but major publishers didn’t want to publish him either, and he committed suicide. Carmen Bullosa made the most provocative point when she said that Latin-American readers were much more cosmopolitan and daring in their taste, that contemporary Spanish language literature had an enormous variety that couldn’t be matched by American writers, and that New York publishing was extremely self-centered and provincial.
In the end, it is one of The Enemies, writer/editor Ben Greenman (who has been published by both small indie presses and major houses) who cynically – or perhaps just realistically – sided with The Man by stating: “American culture doesn’t support writers. But it isn’t corporate publishing mission to do it. Their mission is to make money. Writers work outside of dominant culture. It’s delusional to expect corporate America to pay for it.”
Ouch! But, wait! I just read in an article in the Guardian that Argentina is about to pass a bill to pay its writers a monthly stipend of more than 500 British pounds – which is higher than the state legal minimum wage. Way to go Argentina! We should all move to Buenos Aires!
