Ghost Writers Page 31
Books & Booze
Reading Nooks
Quirky Book Clubs
Prologue Page 7
Page 75
Page 73
Summer 2015
Prologue | 1
Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. - Anna Karenina
The
BOOKSHOP
of Chapel Hill
What happens next? Explore the rest of the story: www.bookshopofchapelhill.com
PRO
15
INE AZ
GUE MAG O L
MMER 20 SU
Prologue Staff Editor
Janell Smith Assistant Editor
Taylor Noel Art Director
Kaitlyn Kelly Assistant Art Director
Aleah Howell Writers
Samantha Miner Danny Nett Sara Salinas Eric Surber Elizabeth Tablazon Designers
Rachel Atwood Louisa Clark Kayla Goforth Kathleen Harrington Meghan McFarland Keely McKenzie
Letter from the Editor My childhood is overwhelmed by memories inexplicably connected to reading. I remember driving to school wonderfully, but fearfully, intrigued by my father, who maneuvered through traffic with the morning’s newspaper spread across the steering wheel. I remember drifting asleep to my mother’s soft voice, which told the tales of the Grimm Brothers. I remember forcing my little sister to play the role of pupil, as I, the teacher, read aloud to her. I remember writing my first award-winning story in the first grade. I also remember taking monthly trips in high school to attend poetry workshops with the former poet laureate of Maryland. Presently, I read more than I did as a child. Reading and writing have molded my character and shaped me. But I’ve come to realize that this experience, which I hope you’ve indulged in as well, is becoming obsolete. In a survey released by the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, people aged 15 and over devote only 6 percent of their time to reading for leisure. That is, out of five hours of free time, Americans spend only 19 minutes reading. Likewise, Sunday book reviews, which were once an integral part of the Sunday newspaper, are almost archaic. These types of facts, which are especially daunting, make me wonder what memories will define my children’s childhoods. When I had the idea to create a magazine strictly dedicated to literature, to prose, to books — to the written word — I didn’t have enough faith to believe the idea would go far. It was a shot in the dark, but I was pleasantly surprised to realize my peers were as passionate about reading as I was. My peers understand that reading is a transcendent experience. Reading is traveling. Reading is shelter. Reading is empathy. Reading is vacation. It’s scary to me that reading has been reduced to just an option. Prologue wants to change the way Americans prioritize reading. Like the prologue to any piece of literature, we want to introduce, or reintroduce, our audience to the novelty of reading. Our mission is to celebrate the art of written word; to inform our audience of noteworthy titles and new developments in the culture of reading; and to encourage Americans to dive back into enjoying books. Prologue aims to be both the literature review journal for the ordinary reader and the literary lifestyle magazine for the seasoned publisher, the renowned author and the literature industry at large. With articles in every issue that are socially, culturally and academically engaging, Prologue challenges you to hop on the couch, cozy up with coffee and rekindle your passion for reading. Experience reading anew. Make new memories.
Advisors
Terence Oliver Linda Brinson COVER ART BY ALEAH HOWELL
Janell Smith
31
Writing
Literacy
Ghostwriters
Literacy Technology
A few ghost authors behind best-selling books share their insights and experiences with the phenomenon.
41
Under the Influence
35 51
Some of literature’s most influential writers worked under the influence of alcohol. Is there a link between drinking and creativity?
63
Technological creations in the states and abroad are bringing literacy education to the 775 million who cannot read.
Illustrated Books
Pictureless books for kids and picture books for adults are helping create better readers.
Dyslexia
Scandalous Memoirs
77
Is the memoir genre being ruined by falsified accounts?
A dyslexic author reveals how his personal struggle with the learning disability made him a better storyteller.
Bookmarks Q&A
11 15
Prologue sat down with Barbara Delinsky to learn about her 2015 summer novel, Blueprints.
Books to Movies
Three popular reads are coming to life on the big screen soon.
57 67
New Authors
When is the right time to publish your debut novel?
Book Reviews
From science fiction to nonfiction, our top book reviews offer various recommendations.
7
Fun
Publishing
Books & Booze
Head to Head
Trade your coffee in for a cocktail. Discover our favorite summer drinks to pair with our favorite reads.
19
Literary Quiz
13
Challenge your literary IQ and see how versed you are in children’s literature and popular novels.
Alternative Publishing
27
Blind Date with a Book
61
5 10 21 75
Fall in love with books in a new way: without a title, without a cover and without a summary.
Is Amazon good for publishing or is it hurting the publishing industry? See what two of our writers had to say.
71
Getting published is difficult. Check out this new publishing trend that is making it just a little bit easier.
Twitter Story
Getting a book to the masses can be a challenge. Tweeting a book is much easier.
Travel
Trending
Calendar
Literary Trends
Join Prologue as we travel from state to state to meet our favorite authors as they take their books on tour this summer.
17
Little Libraries
45
Take a book. Return a book. Find free little libraries near you. Or build your own.
Literary Vacation
Discover literary landmarks that will make your summer vacation one for the books!
Reading Nooks
Find a charming, unique or alternative independently owned bookstore near you.
Celebrities, diversity and dystopia are on the up and up. What literary trends are on their way out?
Psychological Effects Sex experts and psychologists examine Fifty Shades of Grey.
Evolution of the Library
65 73
From printing to storing and retrieving books, technology is changing the way we experience libraries today.
Quirky Book Clubs
If you thought book clubs were for grandmas or Oprah fanatics, you were wrong.
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GRAY MOUNTAIN
GREY GOOSE MARTINI
By John Grisham
Recipe courtesy of Grey Goose Vodka
Samantha Kofer, a third-year associate at New York City’s biggest law firm, loses her job and must start over as an intern at a law clinic in the alpine town of Appalachia where she uncovers secrets hidden deep within the mountains.
2 ½ oz. Grey Goose vodka ½ oz. dry vermouth 1 dash of Orange Bitters Lemon zest Combine all ingredients in a glass and stir. Serve over ice and garnish with a lemon twist.
Buttoned-up and sophisticated with a shocking twist.
PHOTO BY KARA PETERSON PHOTO ILLUSTRATION & DESIGN BY KATHLEEN HARRINGTON
7 | Summer 2015
BY SARA SALINAS Tradition tells us to pair a good book with a cup of tea, sit back, curl up and get cozy. At Prologue, we’ve adopted another approach: Sit up, lean in and trade in your mug for a martini glass. Here are five of our favorite reads — past, present and preview — and cocktails that exude the essence of each.
THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA
SALTY FISHERMAN
By Ernest Hemingway
Rewritten Salty Dog
Hemingway’s classic follows Santiago, a relentless and desperate fisherman, as he battles a prized marlin in the middle of the Gulf Stream. In wrestling with the fish, Santiago triumphs over the daunting sea creature and a string of bad luck, epitomizing courage in the face of defeat.
1 oz. vodka 1 oz. gin 1 oz. lemon juice ½ oz. grapefruit juice Salt for rimming Lemon wedge Salt the rim of a glass. Combine all ingredients and stir. Garnish with lemon wedge.
All the bitterness and salt of the sea. THE GOLDFINCH
GOLD RUSH
By Donna Tartt
Rewritten Whiskey Sour
Thirteen-year-old Theo Decker, abandoned by his father, loses his mother to an accident. Displaced to a new part of town with a new family, he clings to the memory of his mother through her favorite painting and ultimately throws himself into the tumultuous world of art.
1 ½ oz. gold tequila 1 oz. triple sec ½ oz. orange juice ½ oz. lemon juice Orange peel Blackberry Combine all of the ingredients in a glass and stir. Garnish with an orange peel and a blackberry.
Bold, unforgiving and tormented. GO SET A WATCHMAN
PEACH BATIDA
By Harper Lee
Adapted from Cosmopolitan magazine
The characters of Lee’s classic To Kill a Mockingbird reunite twenty years later to revive the life-changing events of their Alabama town. Scout returns to Maycomb and finds herself caught in the personal and political ramifications of her turbulent childhood.
1 oz. white rum 1 oz. peach juice 1 oz. lemon juice ½ oz. simple syrup 1 oz. champagne ½ oz. dark rum
Release date: July 14, 2015
Shake everything but champagne and dark rum with ice. Combine all ingredients in glass.
A Southern sweetheart with a dark side.
Prologue | 8
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. - 1984
The
BOOKSHOP
of Chapel Hill
9 | Summer 2015
What happens next? Explore the rest of the story: www.bookshopofchapelhill.com
Priceless Plots
Little Free Libraries BY ELIZABETH TABLAZON
You’ve probably seen one around: a window to new worlds – a little box, sometimes shaped like a house, home to books. You can take a book, and you can leave one. It’s a Little Free Library. Todd Bol, co-founder and executive director of Little Free Library, built the first little library in 2009 as a tribute to his mother, who was a teacher and an avid reader. He filled the miniature schoolhouse with books and displayed it on his front yard. Co-founder Rich Brooks joined Bol’s craftsmanship with his experience in education and marketing to develop Little Free Library into the worldwide network of about 15,000 libraries that it is today. Both founders credit 20th century philanthropist Andrew Carnegie’s support for public libraries, Lutie Stearns’ traveling libraries, and “take a book, leave a book” collections as their inspiration. To learn how to build your own little library, visit www.littlefreelibrary.org
Little Stories
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4800 FM 68 Gober, Texas
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121 D Street, Salt La ke
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nnessee e, Clarksville, TeHer mother, Dorothy Belt, iv Dr ny aw el Tr 2851 sband hool librarian. or is a retired sc ading. Taylor’s hu Ellen Tayl a love of re in 2014. o instilled in her ristmas present was a teacher wh Ch a as y ar br Li ee Fr e ttl made this Li
ILLUSTRATION & DESIGN BY KAITLYN KELLY
Prologue | 10
Q&A with Barbara Delinsky
STORY BY SAMANTHA MINER
B
arbara Delinsky is a literary powerhouse. Delinsky is an American novelist, mainly a writer of romance novels, from Boston. At age 69, she has more than 60 novels under her own name, about 20 of them under the two pen names — Bonnie Drake and Billie Douglass — and two nonfiction books. She has written 19 New York Times bestsellers, and all proceeds from her 2001 nonfiction book Uplift: Secrets from the Sisterhood of Breast Cancer Survivors have gone to Delinsky’s charitable foundation, which funds a research fellowship at Massachusetts General Hospital. Her latest novel, Sweet Salt Air, was released in 2013, and her next book, Blueprints (St. Martin’s Press), is set to be released on June 9, 2015. Prologue caught up with her during the blizzard of 2015 to ask about her new book.
Prologue Magazine: You seem to put out novel after novel continuously. How do you come up with new material at such a fast pace? Barbara Delinsky: Well, I’m not doing it as quickly now as I used to. Ten years ago, I was doing one book a year and now I’m doing one book every two years. In part because I don’t think my readers, with so many books out there, are as eager to buy one book a year. It’s better to make it more special and do it every two years. But, how do I get more ideas? I read the newspaper every day. I mean, I could stop speaking there. That says it all. PM: Your novel Blueprints, coming out in June, 11 | Summer 2015
PHOTO COURTESY OF BARBARA DELINSKY DESIGN BY MEGHAN MCFARLAND
centers on ageism. What made you want to write about ageism?
BD: Because I see it all around me. That’s really
where I get most of my ideas: either from the news or things I see or experience. A lot of my friends now are reaching the age where they are being eased out of jobs that they love and could continue to do well at because of their age. And I think the problem’s worse for women than it is for men.
PM:
Beyond that, can you explain what Blueprints is about?
BD: Well, that was the germ of the idea first. So I needed a profession where this was very obvious, and the most obvious one is entertainment. The
“
A lot of my friends now are reaching the age where they are being eased out of jobs that they love. — Barbara Delinsky
main character, who’s 56 years old, is the host of a home renovation show that features the company where she works, which is a family company. My publisher actually said – and here’s a perfect example of ageism, so life imitates art or art imitates life – they said to me, “You need to get a younger character in here because younger readers are not going to want to read about this issue as much as they will want to read about someone younger.” So, the woman who becomes the major competitor, who’s going to be replacing my character on the TV show as the host, is her daughter. And, they’ve always been close, so this puts a wedge between them. Now, really what I write most about is family issues. It was perfect along that line. When you’re plotting a book, you need to keep the plot
moving so you have to put in lots of other things like complications. The major problem here is the television show and the wedge that’s put between mother and daughter. At the same time, mother and daughter experience other traumas. So, I have to come dream them up, things that are going to challenge them. It really is about the relationship between this mother and daughter. And this is a theme I’ve often worked with. I wanted the 56-year-old to be the main voice in the book for example, but my publisher said no open with the 29-year-old, and I think that speaks for itself. Prologue | 12
What’s Your Literature IQ:
POP QUIZ!
Nascent or Noble?
If we were to give you a pop quiz, do you think you could prove which word defines your literary knowledge? We’ll give you a quote, and you decipher whether it’s taken from a children’s book or a novel. Can you tell the difference between the talking animals of George Orwell and Eugene Trivizas?
BY DANNY NETT & JANELL SMITH
DESIGN BY KAYLA GOFORTH
Children’s book:
Start
1
2
“Sometimes they went tearing down the quiet roads about the town, scattering chickens and dogs and children.”
Come on, it’s Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell; this didn’t even sound like a children’s book.
3
Adult’s book:
OK, so you got it right — it’s Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell — but probably only because you saw the movie.
4
5
You might think it’s bull, but The Story of Ferdinand by Munro Leaf is actually a children’s book!
“The barn is very cold at night. We’d like some electric blankets.”
Yep, it’s the talking-animal No, it’s Click Clack Moo: story that teaches kids Cows That Type by Doreen everywhere the evils of labor Cronin, but we’ll give unions, Click Clack Moo: Cows you this one. The premise That Type by Doreen Cronin. screams “Orwell.”
13 | Summer 2015
“There was a lady in the moon in Maycomb. She sat at a dresser combing her hair.”
Wrong! If you haven’t read Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird by now, hurry up before the prequel comes out.
“His mother saw that he was not lonesome, and because she was an understanding mother … she let him just sit there and be happy.”
Yep, Munro Leaf ’s The Story of Ferdinand, a picture book about personified cows, had us fighting gender roles way before it was cool.
Fun facts:
“It made the boy sad to see the old man come in each day with his skiff empty …”
You’re just wrong, it’s The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway — hook, line and sinker.
6
You got it; it’s To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, the only assigned reading you actually did freshman year of high school!
That’s right; it’s good old Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea.
“He sniffed deeper and deeper until he was quite filled with the fragrant scent. His heart grew tender, and he realized how horrible he had been.”
Correct! Eugene Trivizas might have done a twist on an old classic, but The Three Little Wolves and the Big Bad Pig is still for the kids.
Nope, The Three Little Wolves and the Big Bad Pig by Eugene Trivizas is a picture book — back to the drawing board.
7
“He was lonely and wanted to be where someone loved him best of all … so he gave up being king.”
Yep! It’s the childhood staple, Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak.
8
Nope, it’s Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak. While you’re moving to the next question, take that time to reevaluate your childhood.
“Not one of them is like another. Don’t ask us why.”
Fun Facts Where the Wild Things Are
By Maurice Sendak Maurice Sendak originally intended for the children’s book to be called Where the Wild Horses Are. After Sendak later realized that he, in fact, could not draw a horse to save his life, his editor asked him what he could draw – to which he just replied: “things.” The book was adjusted accordingly.
Beloved
By Toni Morrison Toni Morrison, the first black woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, confessed to canceling a contract for a memoir about her life. According to the Pulitzer-winning author, she didn’t follow through with it because her life is “not interesting” enough to warrant an autobiography. Compulsive Facebook updaters, please take note.
Gone with the Wind
That’s right; it’s One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish by Dr. the-onlychildren’sauthor-anyonecan-name Seuss.
9
Wrong, it’s One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish by Dr. Seuss. Well, in your defense, we purposely chose a line that didn’t rhyme. Win some; lose some.
“Grass blades, salamanders, spiders, woodpeckers, beetles, a kingdom of ants. Anything bigger wouldn’t do.”
Nope. It does sound like a certain Pixar movie, but it’s Beloved by Toni Morrison.
Results
Yep! It’s Beloved by Pulitzerpulling legend Toni Morrison!
0-3 correct: Nascent novelists So you might have SparkNotes bookmarked on your laptop and are certain Gatsby is just a movie. Big deal. As long as you stay far from Jeopardy! tryouts, you’ll get along fine these days. You might want to check out the classics section (read: any section) of a bookstore, though.
By Margaret Mitchell After a car accident suspended her journalism career, Margaret Mitchell spent nearly a decade secretly writing Gone with the Wind. Although she did send off the manuscript, she openly regretted her decision to print. Responding to a request by the publisher to change the main character’s name, Mitchell responded, “Personally, we could call her ‘Garbage O’Hara’ for all I care. I just want to finish this damn thing …”
10
“The cows lowed it, the dogs whined it, the sheep bleated it, the horses whinnied it, the ducks quacked it.”
Technically wrong, but Animal Farm by George Orwell is essentially a book about mean, talking animals.
4-7 correct: Burgeoning bookworms You probably skipped a book or three in high school, but that’s OK. Who didn’t? At least the expansive memories from your childhood — or like, educated guessing strategies — got you into the average score range. That’s all public education could ask for.
Yep, it’s the Orwellian classic SparkNotes taught you to know and love — Animal Farm by George Orwell.
8-10 correct: Pros of prose Congratulations, you’ve made it. You know your classics, you have a strong opinion on dog-earing, and you probably actually remember the Dewey Decimal System! In fact, you’re so good that we gave you the only decent pun on this quiz. Bravo. Prologue | 14
15 | Summer 2015
PHOTO ILLUSTRATION & DESIGN BY LOUISA CLARK
WRITTEN BY JOJO MOYES
WRITTEN BY DIANE ACKERMAN
The unlikely love story of a paralyzed man and a powerless woman will capture the hearts of moviegoers this summer. In an adaption from British author Jojo Moyes’ novel, Me Before You, Game of Thrones actress Emilia Clarke and Hunger Games actor Sam Claflin will take on the roles of Louisa “Lou” Clarke and Will Traynor. In this film, the poor care assistant and privileged quadriplegic not only fall in love, but also teach each other how to live when living has become a luxury for both. This tale of a small-town girl and her unlikely relationship with the paralyzed man she cares for is sure to take audiences on an unexpected, star-crossed love adventure they’ve yet to experience.
The unbelievably true account of Jan and Antonina Zabinksi, as documented by Diane Ackerman in her novel, The Zookeeper’s Wife, is now headed to the big screen. Jessica Chastain, awardwinning actress in Zero Dark Thirty and The Help, is touted as the leading lady in this World War II-focused film. The movie reveals the extraordinary efforts of Jan and Antonina Zabinski, Polish zookeepers who change the fate of more than 300 doomed and captured Jews. Ackerman, best-selling and heralded author, combined her thorough research skills and intriguing writing style to bring to light Antonina’s story as the zookeeper’s wife, making it fit for the big screen. The book is the winner of the 2008 Orion Book Award. 2016
WRITTEN BY NATHANIEL PHILBRICK Nathaniel Philbrick’s novel, In the Heart of the Sea, forever canonized into American history the true story of the whaleship Essex, an American whaleship from Nantucket that was attacked and sunk by a sperm whale in the Pacific Ocean in 1820. The account of Essex and its crew, which was left at sea for more than 90 days, inspired Herman Melville’s 1851 American classic, Moby-Dick. Academy award-winning director
Ron Howard is adapting the book for the big screen. Australian actor Chris Hemsworth takes on the lead, portraying first mate Owen Chase. His cast mates include Irish actor Cillian Murphy, who starred in Christopher Nolan’s Batman Trilogy, and American actor-comedian Benjamin Walker. Philbrick’s skillful use of historical documents, including a firsthand account written by the Essex’s cabin boy, in combination with “spellbinding” details about whaling and the Nantucket community kept the novel on The New York Times Best Sellers List for 40 weeks and earned Philbrick the 2000 National Book Award for Nonfiction.
Prologue | 16
What's on Our Bookshelf
BY TAYLOR NOEL
Literature is one of the most primal methods of human communication. As an outlet for expression, literature is able to capture what people are thinking about and how they feel at different points in time. Books are basically time machines that take readers backward or forward and immerse them in the cultures of that time and place. During these time trips, readers can determine what was important or not important in society. Drawing on my own obsession with books, these are general trends that I’ve noticed in books in the past five years of time traveling.
Hot Now
Old News
Tina Fey, Amy Poehler and Lena Dunham; the list goes on and on. Celebrities are finding time to write about their lives, and readers are loving it.
Persepolis appears to be the pinnacle of the graphic novel. If people are going to spend almost $30 on a book, I guess they want it to include actual words instead of panels of images.
Celebrity Authors
Graphic Novels
Mental Health
Vampires
The Twilight series both ignited and extinguished the vampire craze.
As people are finding ways to talk about mental illness, writers are writing about it. Characters suffering from mental disorders are becoming much more prominent in works of fiction.
Dystopia Books like Station Eleven and Divergent have spearheaded a new interest in dystopian literature.
Series
People are getting busier and busier and are less willing to dedicate large amounts of time to reading series.
The Fantasy Genre
Diversity The media campaign “We Need Diverse Books” started a conversation about the lack of diversity in American literature. 17 | Summer 2015
ILLUSTRATION & DESIGN BY RACHEL ATWOOD
Ever since Harry Potter, a few fantasy books have sold well, but most are left on the shelves.
You better not never tell nobody but God. - The Color Purple
The
BOOKSHOP
of Chapel Hill
What happens next? Explore the rest of the story: www.bookshopofchapelhill.com Prologue | 18
For Amazon
Online publishing gives authors a risk-free, profitable and efficient method of self-publishing.
BY ERIC SURBER
T
he ease and speed of Internet publishing, through companies such as Amazon, is good for both writers and readers. Readers and writers should celebrate a long-awaited liberation from the oppression of traditional publishing houses — an exodus made possible by electronic publishing. Publishing houses such as Random House and HarperCollins for too long have been writer-mugging monopolies. My uncle Jack Lewis recently published a technical book Feedback Control Systems Demystified through Kindle. Ironically, in the 1970s he owned a publishing house devoted to publishing this genre of technical, calculus-infused books. Lewis realized that as a reclusive writer living in the middle-of-nowhere Virginia, he could never find a publishing house that would risk printing 10,000 copies of his book. Without online publishing, it wouldn’t have happened. Internet publishing empowers writers and enables them to circulate their
“
Online publishing houses will put more of the pen’s power into the hands of writers.
— Eric Surber
19 | Summer 2015
work. Traditionally, authors would send manuscripts to publishing houses — rejection was the norm — and the only alternative was self-publishing, which was usually too expensive and risky. In the rare case the publishing house liked the book, writers would receive only about 10 percent of sales. Ninety percent of the revenue went toward supporting the bureaucracy of editors, businessmen, corporate representatives and internal affairs associates at the publishing house. Amazon eliminates these unnecessary middle stages and middlemen. Through this website, writers can upload novels, and as their website says, publish books in under five minutes. And the company usually gives 70 percent of book revenue to the writer — seven times that from publishing houses. The benefits of electronic publishing don’t stop at e-readers. With such companies as Createspace, owned by Amazon, writers can also print their manuscripts, but better than with publishing houses, they are printed as ordered, which means supply always meets demand, and there is no wasteful and costly printing by the publisher. Online publishing houses will put more of the pen’s power into the hands of writers. The Digital Age is changing the process of publishing for the better.
Against Amazon
Online publishing has created a monopoly that destroys the financial stability of publishing houses. BY TAYLOR NOEL
B
elieve it or not, there was a time when Amazon was the book industry’s rescuer. As chain bookstores such as Borders were closing their doors and the technology boom left print people trembling in fear of the future for paper commodities, Amazon offered a glimmer of hope, a chance of survival. Then Amazon started amassing power and forging its way to a monopoly on the electronic book market. Publishers and booksellers watched as the company morphed from savior to destructor. Amazon now covets more than 60 percent of all e-book sales and more than 30 percent of print book sales. It essentially dominates a market that leaves the publishers powerless. Amazon prefers to sell all books at the flat rate of $9.99. Publishers have no say in the prices of their e-books. This doesn’t make sense. Newly released books should not be of equal price to books that have been sold for 10 years. This business plan hurts the sales of newly released books and stunts the financial success publishers and authors hope to obtain when releasing a new book. While production costs are certainly lower for e-book publication, hard-cover and paperback books cannot compete with the online price. Why would people purchase the new hardcover of a bestseller for $25 when they could just
“
Publishers and booksellers watched as the company morphed from savior to destructor.
— Taylor Noel
purchase it through Kindle for $9.99? Publishers price their titles differently depending on length, content, materials and marketability. They should be able to extend the same strategy to e-books. If a publisher is counting on one of its front list titles to carry the sales for that season, it should be able to adjust the Amazon price accordingly. And it’s not just the publishers that are suffering in this partnership. The authors whose books are sold for increasingly less will make less money in royalties from e-book sales. Authors who published with Hachette were greatly hurt when Amazon decided to remove all books from this publisher from the website and to delay ordered books for weeks. These games and infantile tactics that Amazon continues to employ in the effort to bully publishers are manipulative and destructive for the industry as a whole. Amazon is extorting publishers and authors, and will continue to do so as long as it can control the market.
DESIGN BY KEELY MCKENZIE
Prologue | 20
Booklust meets Wanderlust BY TAYLOR NOEL
Lao Tzu once wrote, “A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.” I, for one, am inclined to disagree with the great philosopher. A great traveler, in my good opinion, sees all there is to see and is immensely changed by the wonder of it. How could a good traveler not be changed – and not feel empowered to write – by sitting at a café in which Ernest Hemingway once wrote? How does one not feel insignificant and small when standing in Trinity College, looking at an illuminated manuscript of the Gospel? How can a person not feel the magic of the world when standing in King’s Cross Station at Platform 9 ¾ ? I digress. To prove my point, join me on an excursion — a literary excursion across Europe to visit some of the most prominent and celebrated literary landmarks. 21 | Summer 2015
PHOTO COURTESY OF ANNA ORMOND
Prologue | 22
ENGLAND It just makes sense to start this literary vacation in one of the greatest literary capitals of the world. England — the land of William Shakespeare, Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, William Wordsworth, George Orwell, J. K. Rowling, Charles Dickens and Lewis Carroll — has a deep history of producing literary masterpieces. For the purposes of this trip, we are going to visit two of England’s finest cities: Oxford and London. Oxford boasts such literary giants
as J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis and Charles Dickens. Begin your tour of Oxford at Christ Church, one of the city’s grandest colleges, on St. Aldate’s Street. Alice in Wonderland fans might know that the story derived from a real-life friendship between author Lewis Carroll and the children of the Dean of Christ Church. Carroll especially befriended the dean’s daughter Alice. Alice’s adventures in the famous book stem from a picnic adventure that she and Lewis shared while he told her the fantastic
N KELLY NS BY KAITLY ILLUSTRATIO INGTON RR HA EN THLE DESIGN BY KA
23 | Summer 2015
stories he later wrote down. Leaving the church, venture to Brewer Street to see Pembroke College, where J.R.R. Tolkien resided as a professor from 1925 to 1945. After visiting the picturesque college, head over to The Eagle and Child pub. This is the pub that catered to the literary group known as The Inklings, which included members C. S. Lewis and Tolkien. Just down the road from the famous café is Wolvercote Cemetery, Tolkien’s burial place. After paying your respects to the author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings series, pay respects to a place of inspiration for J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter. The Bodleian Library is known as being the muse of the Hogwarts Library because of its unusual gargoyles and large wooden bookshelves and study desks. The entrance to the University Church of St. Mary the Virgin is another place that spurred literary greatness. Across from the entrance is an intricately carved wooden door with a lion in the center that inspired The Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis. Down the road and across from Magdalen College are the Botanic Gardens that Phillip Pullman used to create his trilogy beginning with The Golden Compass. If you aren’t satiated by these astounding landmarks, spend the night at the Old Parsonage Hotel where Oscar Wilde was rumored to lodge and jump on a train for more sights in London. Start with Westminster Abbey. There is so much to see in this famous building, but be sure to visit
the Poets’ Corner. In this area, you will see sculptures, tablets and signs that collectively form a shrine to the literary greats of England. Chaucer, Browning, Dickens, Hardy and Tennyson are all buried here, but Byron, Shakespeare, Austen, Blake, the Brontë sisters and George Eliot are glorified by memorials. Jane Austen fans might want to take a quick trip out of London to visit the Jane Austen museum in Hampshire. Fans of Sherlock Holmes should tour the Sherlock Holmes museum in London. All the literarily inclined should visit The British Library, which is home to the Magna Carta as well as original manuscripts by Austen, the Brontës, Lewis Carroll, Angela Carter and James Joyce. While in the area, admire the Bloomsbury neighborhood made famous by Virginia Woolf when she
England
Scotland
published T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land at Hogarth Press. On the way to Bloomsbury from the British Library, stop at 48 Doughty St. for a glance at the home of Charles Dickens. It was in this home, now turned museum, that Dickens wrote Oliver Twist and The Pickwick Papers. If you are in need of a new friend, go to London’s oldest bookstore, Hatchards, or the famous Daunt Books and take your pick of hundreds of amazing books. To close out a cultured day, dedicate an evening in London to watching a play at The Globe Theater, Shakespeare’s second home. And don’t forget to visit Platform 9 ¾ in Kings Cross Station. Yes, it is really is there – well, at least the muggle version of the magical Hogwarts entrance is. If you aren’t a poor twenty-
Ireland
something, you may want to take a side trip to Edinburgh, Scotland, while you are in the vicinity.
SCOTLAND Perhaps take a train from King’s Cross Railway Station in London — be sure to stop by Platform 9 ¾ — to Edinburgh, Scotland, and visit The Elephant House, the café in which J. K. Rowling wrote Harry Potter. Also of note is The Writers’ Museum containing Robert Burns’ writing desk. Dan Brown fans will surely stop by Rosslyn Chapel, which was featured in The Da Vinci Code. Holyrood Park, the setting of David Nicholls’s One Day is also in Edinburgh. It might be nice to stop by renowned bookstore Edinburgh Books to buy a book to read before meandering through the park.
France Netherlands Sweden
Czech Republic Prologue | 24
If you are a thorough traveler, an exorbitant traveler or simply a diehard fan of James Joyce, you may even consider extending your trip to Dublin, Ireland.
IRELAND Dublin has been awarded the title of a UNESCO City of Literature. James Joyce groupies
should tour his museum, The James Joyce Centre. Grab a drink at Davy Byrnes, the pub that Joyce used as a backdrop for his masterpiece, Ulysses. Wander in awe through the library at Trinity College and be sure to gawk at the Book of Kells. Saint Patrick’s Cathedral is where Jonathan Swift lived while he wrote Gulliver’s Travels. The Dublin
FRANCE Baudelaire, Zola, Rimbaud, Proust, Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Fitzgerald, Joyce and Beckett – for centuries Paris has nurtured famous and talented writers, some native by birth and others who moved to find their home. Hemingway wrote, “If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a movable feast.” There are plenty of literary landmarks upon which to feast your eyes in Paris. Shakespeare and Company is arguably the most famous bookstore in Europe. Founded by George Whitman in 1951, this bookstore was frequented by luminaries like Hemingway, Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein. Speaking of Stein, you can visit her home on 27 rue des Fleurus. Maison Victor Hugo, the former home of Victor Hugo, is another home you can tour while in Paris. Fans of George Sand can see her home at the Musée de la Vie Romantique. Take a break from absorbing the power that is literary history and grab a coffee at Café de la Mairie, where Hemingway penned The Sun Also Rises. Les Deux Magots is another famous café in which James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Picasso and Hemingway shamelessly drank to excess. For accommodations, stay in Hotel Le Pavillon des Lettres. Each of the 26 rooms is decorated in accordance to its assigned letter of the alphabet that represents a
PHOTO COURTESY OF SARAH KEARNEY
25 | Summer 2015
Writers Museum holds a first edition of Bram Stoker’s Dracula as well as many other rare literary artifacts. After restocking your supply of reading matter at The Winding Stair, a quaint bookshop, catch a plane to Paris to advance to another literary destination.
famous writer. Pay your respects to Oscar Wilde by visiting his tomb in the Père-Lachaise Cemetery. The American Library in Paris is the largest English-language lending library in Europe. It was founded in 1920 using leftover books that had been sent “over there” for soldiers who were fighting in the trenches during World War I. There is so much to see in Paris and it can be overwhelming at times. If you find yourself feeling this way, leisurely stroll along the Seine and leaf through the used book vendors that line the river. Read a book in the Jardin du Luxembourg. Take leave of this bustling city and buy a ticket to Amsterdam for a change of pace, scenery and literature.
NETHERLANDS Perhaps the most famous work of literature from Amsterdam is Anne Frank’s diary. You can visit her house, now called the Anne Frank Museum, and see the attic her family lived in while hiding from the Nazis. The house and attic remain as they were during the Holocaust. Dine in the De Filosoof Hotel and reminisce about the first time you read John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars. Go to The Rijksmuseum and seek out paintings by Vermeer to compare with the book about the painter, Girl with a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier. If you are feeling ambitious, take a train to The Hague and see the painting for itself. For something a bit less heavy, visit the tree house, the ABC Treehouse, that is. It’s an amazing bookstore decorated like a treehouse with bookshelves winding up the tree trunk.
Anyone up for a quick detour to Stockholm?
SWEDEN The Millennium Tour at the Stockholm City Museum will take visitors on a tour of all the places referenced in Steig Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. There is also a statue of Pippi Longstocking’s creator, Astrid Lindgren, in Tegnérlunden Park. Stockholm also claims Henning Mankell, a widely read Swedish crime author. I did say quick detour, right? On to Prague!
CZECH REPUBLIC Franz Kafka is Prague’s literary claim to fame. An entire museum in this charming Eastern European city details the life of this literary icon. Café Slavia is the famous spot at which poets, writers and intellectuals
would gather for conversation. Poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote Two Stories of Prague in this café. U Zlatého tygra, one of Prague’s most famous pubs, is where Czech author Bohumil Hrabal was first introduced to President Bill Clinton. After you’ve had a drink or two at the pubs, visit The Globe Bookstore and Café, Prague’s first Englishlanguage bookstore, and buy a few books while you sober up. Franz Kafka once wrote, “Paths are made by walking.” Walking through the literary sights of Europe creates a path of wonder, of awe and of appreciation for all that literature has to offer. David Mitchell wrote “Travel far enough, you meet yourself.” In addition to walking a new path to literature, I hope that all you weary travelers are able to find something of yourselves, something that mirrors your bookish personas along the way. Prologue | 26
ILLUSTRATIONS & DESIGN BY RACHEL ATWOOD
PARTNERSHIP PUBLICATION It was only a matter of time until book publication made its way onto the web.
BY SAMANTHA MINER
S
ome authors, especially debut authors, have found it challenging to get a foot in the door at the traditional, and at times political, publishing houses. Often, publishing houses have positive feedback for authors but still decide
27 | Summer 2015
to pass on picking up a book. For whatever reason, large publishers are reluctant to take on novice writers’ works. In some instances, publishers don’t believe they could sell enough copies, or they simply don’t want to take a risk on an unknown debut author.
The new era of what some call partnership publishing has begun to combat the publishing bureaucracy. Partnership publishers are built off the traditional publishing house model and, in some instances, traditional publishing houses have partnership publishing branches, as in the case of White Cloud Press. This hybrid publishing model offers the freedom and creative control that comes with self-publishing, combined with the quality of distribution and provided structure of the traditional publishing house method. A number of websites such as Inkshares, She Writes Press and Turning Stone Press offer a new take on pay-to-publish or crowdfunded publishing methods. This style of publishing is a means for authors to go the indie route while still receiving many of the benefits of traditional publishing. Authors that opt to go this direction tend to be fed up with either the hoops they have to jump through to gain access to traditional publishing houses or the overall lack of support post-publishing. This approach isn’t just for authors who haven’t had success with traditional publishing methods. Though previously published authors are now beginning to turn to this new style of publishing as well, simply because they are unsatisfied with the traditional process.
REAPING THE BENEFITS “Partnership publishing is a fairly new model, a revolutionary pay-topublish or crowdfunding approach rapidly gaining traction among savvy authors who want greater control of their work, along with a higher percentage of earnings on the tail end of the publication process,” said April Eberhardt, literary agent and founder of her own literary agency. One of the main driving forces drawing authors to partnership publishing is that authors tend to receive a higher percentage of their profits. Authors receive “typically 40 to 85 percent versus the 8 to 15
‘‘
For better or for worse, there’s still a taboo around self publishing. It’s still not considered very respectable. - Samuél L. Barrantes
percent traditional publishers offer,” Eberhardt said. In most instances, partnership publishers offer their books in both print and e-formats, while selfpublishing tends to be mainly digital these days, through an individual’s website or platforms such as Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing. Beyond the monetary benefits, partnership publishing offers the creative control provided by self-publication without the bad reputation vanity publishers have acquired. Self-published books exclusively online are often unsuccessful, and vanity publishers often don’t offer sale support postpublishing. Vanity publishers tend to be unattractive options for authors because of their notoriety for taking substantial payments from authors upfront, then delivering a questionable product in terms of editing and design. Partnership publishers are less do-it-yourself than vanity publishers or other online publishing platforms. They often have industry professionals on staff and offer a more involved approach in terms of marketing and actually getting the book out there. They have a more hands-on method simply because that they have more at stake in the success, or lack thereof, of the books they publish. “That’s in stark contrast to subsidy publishers, where books’ sales have no bearing on the companies’ profits, which all come from fees charged for services up front,” Eberhardt said. While many new authors are flocking to this modern take on publishing, others still see selfpublishing as taboo. In many cases, what it really comes down to is the financing. Some authors are hesitant to pay or fundraise to be published.
Even with partnership publishing, authors still bear the cost of editing, production, marketing and publicity in most cases. “For some authors, the cost of partnership publishing can seem prohibitive or beyond their budget,” Eberhardt said. “Authors I’ve worked with who’ve selected pay-to-publish models have found it to be a $5,000 to $10,000 investment, not including printing costs. While choosing to publish exclusively digitally will eliminate print costs, it can still entail an investment of $3,000 to $5,000 for editing, cover design and layout.”
THE PUBLISHING VEIN OF THE FUTURE Partnership publishing is becoming an attractive option for writers wanting to publish their books professionally without completely handing over control to a publishing outlet. The hybrid model offers authors the chance to retain creative control and receive higher royalties while enjoying the expertise and structure of a traditional publisher. “For better or for worse, there’s still a taboo around self publishing,” Barrantes said. “It’s still not considered very respectable.” While this option is not yet widespread, partnership publishing is growing and could become the norm. For authors who don’t want the progress of their work entirely out of their hands but don’t want the risks or bad reputation that comes with vanity publishing, partnership publishing might be ideal. Partnership publishing is bringing book publishing into the 21st century and making sure authors’ voices are heard loud and clear in the publishing process. Prologue | 28
Inkshares Inkshares is a San Franciscobased, crowdfunded publisher operating on the partnership-publishing model. Inkshares works with its authors to figure out the necessary funding to publish their books. The website’s crowdfunding method works by having the proceeds from the sales of the first set number of sold books go directly into the publishing of the book and the actual manufacturing costs. People go online and become backers by preordering the book. Once the goal is met, the book goes into production, and the author begins to receive a percentage of the book sales from that point on. Inkshares works with its authors to edit, produce, market and actually publish the book. The publisher distributes the book to both major chains and smaller, independent bookstores through Ingram Publisher Services. Ingram aids publishers of all varieties with the distribution of their products.
Inkshares’ first novel is Samuél L. Barrantes’ Slim and The Beast, which recently hit the mark of 1,000 books preordered. Barrantes emphasized that he chose the company for its community philosophy. “I just realized how subjective the entire system was,” Barrantes said. “When I heard about Inkshares and the whole premise of the readers decide – if enough readers want to read it, it will be read – I figured instead of writing a hundred query letters, why don’t I just put something out that a hundred people might want to read or two hundred people or however many I need to fund it?” Barrantes said Inkshares being the middle ground between selfpublishing and traditional publishing drew him to the company. “When I saw that they were legit – not a self-published kind of deal – and that I would get an editor from a big publishing house and have a design firm work on it, it was kind of a nobrainer for me.”
Slim and the Beast
By Samuel L. Barrantes
Sergeant Chandler Dykes is obsessed with two misfits: Slim, a former cadet and his best friend The Beast. When Slim and The Beast take shelter from a hurricane in a country bar, they learn that Sgt. Dykes has been haunting the place, raving about opossums, bathtub whiskey, and his estranged cadet, Slim.
She Writes Press She Writes Press offers a similar set of services as Inkshares, but the publisher exclusively caters to female authors, and the projects are not all necessarily crowdfunded. With She Writes Press, authors invest in the publishing of their work initially, either through footing the $4,900 cost themselves or via crowdfunding websites. They ultimately receive 70 percent of the net profits of print book purchases and 80 percent of the net profits of e-book purchases. Submitted works are accepted for publishing if they are reviewed and thought to have potential. Accepted books are organized into three separate categories: ready for publishing, in need 29 | Summer 2015
of copy editing or in need of additional developmental editing. The book receives additional attention if needed and is then published and available for purchase online or in print. Brooke Warner, a publisher at She Writes Press, said, “We aren’t interested in being in the digitalonly space, and the main benefits of traditional distribution really kick in for print books more than for e-books, though those print books might drive e-book sales – which is just another bonus of having both formats available to readers.” She Writes Press also offers sales support to its authors and has a partnership with the public relations company BookSparks to provide more marketing and publicity opportunities and options to its authors.
What’s Your Book? By Brooke Warner
Brooke Warner is the founder of She Writes Press. Her book, What’s Your Book? is an aspiring author’s go-to guide for getting from idea to publication.
Booktrope Booktrope is another online partnership publisher that works on a team-publishing model. Booktrope goes as far as calling partnership publishing the “publishing revolution.” At Booktrope, authors join the website and submit their manuscripts for approval to start the process. Once the manuscript is accepted, authors build their publishing teams, work on the book collectively, publish it when ready and market the final product. The team structure allows the author to contribute to and be involved in every aspect of the book’s development — from editing to marketing plan to cover design — giving the author the ultimate creative control over his or her work with the help and support of a professional team. Unlike other partnership publishers or self-publishing outlets, Booktrope has zero upfront fees. In terms of
money, 70 percent of book revenues go directly back to the creative team that works on the book, and royalties are paid monthly. The company, team members and author share the cost of Booktrope’s provided marketing support. The idea is that, theoretically, because the whole team shares in the revenue rather than getting paid up-front, everyone is invested in the success of the book and is more committed to creating a great final product. This ensures the writer has a team invested in the success of his or her work. Like Inkshares and She Writes Press, Booktrope offers both e-books and print versions. The books are available for purchase through a number of retailers, notably iTunes, Barnes & Noble’s website and Amazon, among a few others. In terms of the publisher’s reach, Booktrope has upwards of 2.9 million copies of its books purchased or distributed through giveaways.
Caramel and Magnolias
By Tess Thompson
Crushed by a broken heart, Cleo Tanner walked away from her acting dreams to lead a quiet, secluded life in Seattle. Sylvia, her best friend from college, is trapped in a loveless marriage, distraught by her inability to conceive a child—until an adoption agency owner in relentless pursuit of Cleo offers to help.
Comparison of Publishing Methods
Self Publishing
Partnership Publishing
Traditional Publishing
• Typically only published as e-books to reduce costs (it can be free to publish online)
• Published both in print and online formats
• Published in print and online formats
• 100% profits go to author
• Authors receive anywhere from 45% to 85% of profits
• No sale, marketing or PR support unless it is independently sought
• Sale support, marketing and PR typically included in publishing deal
• Authors typically receive about 5% to 15% of the sale profits
• Odds of success are against authors due to little visibility
• Moderate public visibility given to books
• Free to publish if online; expensive to publish through Vanity publishers
• Publishing costs covered by crowd-funding or out-ofpocket payments by author
• Marketing and PR offered, post-release sale support is typically minimal • Higher public visibility given to books • Costs of publishing covered by publisher Prologue | 30
PHOTO ILLUSTRATION & DESIGN BY ALEAH HOWELL 31 | Summer 2015
BY ERIC SURBER Margaret Keane’s caricatures of wide-eyed crying children were instantly sensational in the 1960s. Keane became a master painter in her lifetime, and as with all great painters, Keane’s name was adopted as the name of her style. As Van Gogh is synonymous with bright, flagrant brush strokes and Picasso redolent of geometric shapes, Keane was her own distinct and coveted brand. But there was a problem: She wasn’t receiving credit. Her husband Walter Keane said he was the painter, convincing his wife they’d be more successful if the artist was a man. Margaret proved herself the true painter by suing her ex-husband in court and winning a copyright case. The jury sided with Margaret, essentially saying credit belongs where credit is due, and in the art world, credit always belongs with the creator. This ethical concept, however, isn’t so decisive when the author uses words instead of paint. Ghostpainter isn’t a word. Perhaps “ghostpainters” would paint ghosts, but “ghostwriters” don’t usually write about them. Ghostwriters are writers who sell their words — along with the bylines — translating the thoughts and ideas of clients without the motivation, time or writing skills into polished, readable copy. Ghostwriting famously began in the early 20th century with the prolific novelist Edward Stratemeyer. Stratemeyer was a writer and businessman who capitalized on the
market for children’s books, which before him consisted mainly of dry, moral fables and fairy tales like The Little Red Riding Hood. He started his career writing novels, but after founding the “Stratemeyer Literary Syndicate” in 1906, he realized that using authors with pen names was more profitable. Authors retained copyrights, but such names as “Victor Appleton” appeared on the covers. Stratemeyer had a lucrative multimillion dollar career, creating several famous children’s series including Tom Swift, The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew. But his career began the dissociation between author and writer. Ghostwriting has continued as a profitable industry since Stratemeyer’s original business venture. Publishers often use ghostwriters because demand exceeds supply. People can read novels much faster than authors write them, so ghostwriters are hired to produce more books more quickly. The most famous example is James Patterson, who uses ghostwriters to produce about five crime fiction novels a year. Celebrities often contact ghostwriters because they can’t write readable best-selling content. Glance at The New York Times Best Sellers List: There are about 10 books written by celebrities — many of whom became famous for reasons other than writing. A celebrity memoir can fetch
millions in sales and boost publicity. Hillary Clinton’s memoir Hard Choices brought Clinton an $8 million advance and reportedly $15 million in sales. The book was ghostwritten with a team of three writers whose names appear on page 597. Ghostwriters’ identities are (mostly) kept secret, but that they exist and are frequently used is well known. Often, like real ghosts, they are elusive. When President Barack Obama writes a letter, it’s assumed he wasn’t the only one wielding the pen, or when he delivers a speech, we know he had professional help. But sometimes, ghostwriting seems more problematic — more fundamentally unethical. When an author writes a novel, should the name on the cover always match the writer’s name? Some authors say ghostwriting, in all cases, is problematic. Demian Farnworth praises the King James Bible as the best book — a book possibly ghostwritten, see “Ghosts Throughout History”— to develop your vocabulary, but Farnworth, an ex-ghostwriter, avid blogger and copywriter, said the practice of ghostwriting is problematic. “To be honest, there wasn’t anything that I enjoyed about it,” Farnworth said. “What bothered me the most was when I saw the person who I was writing for claim the work for himself, particularly when he was asked point blank how he — a founder and CEO of two companies — could manage to knock out so
Ghosts on the Cover Prologue | 32
much content. They call that lying where I come from.” Aside from being an avid blogger, he works as chief copywriter for copyblogger.com, a website that helps companies improve their copy, marketing techniques and social media presence. Before becoming chief content writer for the website, Farnworth was a ghostwriter, which he stopped doing about three years ago. Today, he works mostly under his name and speaks out against the practice of ghostwriting. He wrote a blog post The Brutally Honest Truth About Ghostwriting for the website Raven Blog, in which he describes his experience ghostwriting and its inherent ethical dilemmas that caused him a near-suicidal depression. He condemns the practice, emphasizing that it breaks the trust between reader and writer. Farnworth said that even when writers synthesize another’s ideas and thoughts, often the case with celebrities, it’s still a problem. He makes an interesting point. “Think about it: nothing magical happens when money exchanges hands,” Farnworth said. “The writer still wrote it. Still shaped it. Still made it readable. We may look at it as a business transaction, but in reality the celebrity is paying someone to keep their mouth shut.” Or maybe it’s just a fact of life. “Ghostwriting is a fact of life, at least in the business world,” said Julie Eason, author of more than a dozen books and ghostwriter of both
BOOKS
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“
My clients all have their own material. They have their own messages. They are the authors — I am the writer.
— Julie Eason
a New York Times and an Amazon bestseller. Among her greatest achievements is a record for fastest book ever written in 2011, which took seven days. Eason works mainly with business people. She helps to publish, craft and market books with the ultimate goal being publicity and profit. She works with clients from different businesses, and Eason said she enjoys learning about different topics when she writes books. “My favorite aspect is learning all the cool things my authors have to teach others. It’s like I get an inside education on the topic,” she said, but her least favorite is writing the final chapter because she “chooses clients very carefully, and often becomes close friends with them.” Eason says she enjoys helping people put their thoughts and ideas into words. And because she writes only for authors whose messages she agrees with, she doesn’t experience moral dissonance. To her, ghostwriting isn’t dishonest. “Think about it — these people have huge organizations to run, and books are marketing tools,” she said. “They outsource all kinds of work
1930 Nancy Drew Edward Stratemeyer used ghostwriters to create Tom Swift, The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew.
RESEARCH
from data analysis to ad campaigns. Why should book writing be any different? My clients all have their own material. They have their own messages. They are the authors — I am the writer.” For Eason, author and writer are distinct entities: The former develops the content while the latter translates the content into words. These entities, for her, are not necessarily the same person. Ghostwriting exists outside of novels. Ghostwriting occurs more frequently outside of literary fiction, often appearing in nonfiction works and technical journals. Engineers without the writing skills to publish their research often hire ghostwriters to put their thoughts into words. “Most of my ghostwriting has been in the technical field,” Carol Lewis, an engineer, editor and author, said. “Typically, if a company wants an article published — not an advertisement — but an article that references a product and speaks well of it, it would be published in a technical journal.” Lewis is now an editor, but previously worked as an engineer and writer. She possessed both the writing skills and engineering
2008 Journal of Medicine Engineers without the writing skills often hire ghostwriters to put their thoughts into words.
wherewithal to write accurate and readable copy for engineers. Whether or not she received the byline for her work depended upon the buyer. If the magazine hired Lewis, then she would get the byline, which isn’t technically ghostwriting. If the engineer hired her, then usually the engineer’s name would appear on the article. Like Eason, Lewis enjoyed ghostwriting and said she never felt remorse or that her work was immoral or dishonest. “I enjoyed it,” Lewis said. “I was a good go-between. I feel like a lot of scientists and engineers who were credited with the article weren’t good writers. But they knew their stuff. They had important content.” However, when asked about ghostwriting in general, she raised some ethical concerns. She said her work wasn’t creative. Lewis wasn’t an artist or a novelist. Her work as an author would further science and technology, and had she been asked by James Patterson to write a fiction novel for a series, she would have declined. “I know that people who have a really great brand, a really big name, they will want to produce more books, so they will use another writer, but I’m kind of disappointed in that,” Lewis said. “To me, that seems kind of wrong. Especially if it’s fiction, or poetry, art.” Perhaps this is why “ghostpainter” isn’t in the dictionary.
Ghosts Throughout History Beyond the Literary
The Apostle Peter may not have written his own books in the Bible. The Holy Ghost may not have been the Bible’s only ghostwriter. The Apostle Peter identifies himself as the author of the book bearing his name, but many scholars believe he may have employed some outside help. Essentially they believe the book’s eloquent Greek is beyond the capabilities of a former tradesman.
Raphael delegated painting backgrounds to his assistants, but he still took the credit. Employing assistant “ghosts” has been common practice throughout history — in art outside of literature. Many painters, the Old Masters, used assistants to fill in their art, painting less important background figures and scenery. A cleaning of Raphael’s “Transfiguration” revealed that assistants likely finished a few of the figures in the lower left corner.
Many Baroque composers used ghostwriters for less glamorous musical parts. MEMOIRS
2014 Hard Choices Celebrity Hillary Clinton’s memoir was ghostwritten by a team of three writers.
Musical composers have also used ghosts. French Baroque composers often used students to write the less important inner-lines and melodies. Famously, Jean-Baptiste Lully employed his student, Jean-Fra nçois Lallouette, to write the harmony lines, particularly the viola part.
Prologue | 34
35 | Summer 2015
PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY ALEAH HOWELL & KAYLA GOFORTH DESIGN BY KAYLA GOFORTH
Popular culture suggests substance use fuels creative thought, but entire professions cannot be relegated to products of drunken imagination. Writing requires more than just creative juices flowing. BY DANNY NETT
It ranges from our distant, simian relatives that lick hallucinogenic jungle centipedes — all the way to musical powerhouses like Kurt Cobain and Amy Winehouse, who fused widespread lyrical success with drug and alcohol abuse. The marriage of revelry and creativity with the use of realityaltering substances started as early as the Neolithic Revolution — around 10,000 B.C. And despite the continuing arguments between condoners and condemners of the relationship between imagination and intoxication, there’s no sign of
divorce papers anytime soon. In fact, this link spans the entirety of modern civilization — its fingerprints are smudged across the last 12,000 years of our history. While the jury is still out on exactly what inspired such prehistoric creativity as cave paintings, it’s likely that they were made in conjunction with the consumption of naturally occurring hallucinogens, according to a 2008 paper published by Eva Hopman at the University of Groningen. Cultural and religious drinking — sometimes including Prologue | 36
deities dedicated entirely to beer and wine — appear in ancient Egypt, Greece, Babylon, Rome, China and other civilizations. In the heart of most historical celebrations, festivals or ceremonies, there was a guaranteed blood alcohol level. Through the centuries, popular support for and against alcohol as an outlet for recreation and creativity has ebbed and flowed — typically by the gravity of religious resurgences of the eras. Whether they are used as a medicine, religious sacrament, celebration, inspiration or just a tool to ease one’s burdens, alcohol’s properties that influence our brains have kept booze a human staple for thousands of years. But how exactly does it affect how we think? Glass by glass, alcohol weakens our working memory — the ability to strain relevant information out of the knowledge and memories we don’t need to access, according to University of Chicago psychology professor Sian Beilock. While this can impede the brain’s ability to solve analytic-based problems, researchers believe the temporary stunting of working memory might also have a hand in enhancing our ability to function abstractly and to think outside the box. With alcohol clogging our internal filter, our brains have access to use all the possible memories that would have normally been disregarded as peripheral information. Although there’s conflicting research regarding whether — and at what levels — alcohol really fuels creative inspiration, knowledge of its anecdotal effects is everywhere. Dependency is common knowledge when speaking of writers like Ernest Hemingway, Edgar Allen Poe, Tennessee Williams — but the narrative stops short, citing this facet of their lives as merely pieces of trivia. In turn, alcohol’s persuasion in the writing process is something often lost in translation — and something this piece hopes to explore firsthand. 37 | Summer 2015
Because of working memory, in the peak hours of the day, we’re able to sit in the corner of a local coffee shop, order a cup of our favorite stimulant and block out the ambient buzz of upset toddlers and awkward first dates. We can punch out clear and well-formatted paragraphs, as our sentences are being written concisely and are flowing cohesively. At this point, our cognitive pistons are firing with all the power they — and a $5 cup of coffee — can muster. This is in part because caffeine, like other stimulants, enhances problemsolving skills, curbs fatigue and boosts our focus and memory. Once ingested, caffeine molecules work to nullify a compound called adenosine, essentially triggering the body’s “fight or flight” response. This floods the brain with neurotransmitters that improve cognitive and bodily function, ensuring our working memory is in peak condition. Because of this increased focus, however, the brain functions through a kind of tunnel vision, blocking out the type of wandering thoughts that often serve as tinder for creative approaches. Unlike alcohol, which serves as a depressant, it’s not until your “caffeine high” crashes in a few hours that you’ll start to notice your mind straying from the subject at hand. As you return home for the night, the caffeine has probably long since cycled out of your bloodstream — typically rendering you useless for any task beyond finishing the 22nd season of Grey’s Anatomy on Netflix. If you’re stuck writing an assignment, maintaining a strong structure requires a little more pensiveness. The period of time it takes to form new sentences is slowly widening, but grammar and syntax are still holding strong. If you happen to have just spent your vacation budget to have a 2006 Honda Civic towed to a mechanic to get the battery replaced, this might be the point in your day when you crack open that bottle of Riesling in the back of the fridge.
FIELD RESEARCH, GLASS BY GLASS 1st glass
The initial glass does little to affect concentration — rather, it helps the mind conjure ideas more freely and permits your fingers to publish more liberally. There is less inhibition, and you’re more willing to stray from formal structure and tone. If you’re following in the footsteps of writers and lyricists before you, the words don’t really start to flow until the wine does.
2nd glass
Two glasses later, and a writer might start to deviate from previous paragraph structure. There’s a noticeable shift in tone, and his ability to focus on the writing process is beginning to waver. Maybe now he moves from the kitchen table to work on the guest bed upstairs. At this point, there is something about alcohol that makes a writer painfully conscious of every caveat in his writing — like some kind of literary homage to the seventh grade. He might suddenly be hyper-aware that 14 em dashes is probably a few too many to have used by the 10th graf. But hey, there are worse vices for someone to have. Riesling comes to mind.
3rd glass
The slight blurring of structure is accompanied by the deterioration of fluidity. Like an old man recounting the loss of his five senses, a writer easily marks word choice as “the next to go.” If there’s any lesson to take from anecdotal evidence, it’s that poor metaphors flourish when watered by $6 wine.
4th glass
About an hour after the maiden voyage to the miscellaneous drawer that holds the corkscrews and cookie cutters, the aforementioned blurring is in full swing. As anyone who’s tried to write during the era of the smartphone can attest, the death of spelling and grammar is anticipatorily looming as a third glass stands empty. Whether it’s a personal loss of focus or the world’s inconsiderate habit of spinning after a few drinks, typos always seem to thrive in the realm of drunk people. Just a little longer before linguistic fortitude comes crashing down.
5th glass OK, so maybe grammar is holding out a little longer than predicted — but maybe that’s to be expected when one’s parents had formal English paddled into them by a Catholic school. Either way, it seems sacrilegious to be thanking nuns for anything right now, given the circumstances.
6th glass
Now any remnant of ornateness has long since rusted off the writing voice, and the hopeful author has fallen asleep at least twice. As the fermented influence reaches its peak, a writer’s focus is the last stronghold to crumble. Now and then thoughts drift away from the task at hand and toward something menial, like some disinterested boy — and all one can do is curse his devastatingly blue eyes and passive-aggressively hope he reads this magazine. It’s the point in the night all too familiar for anyone over the age of 21. It’s possible this is the stage of the process that writers like Poe and F. Scott Fitzgerald reaped like a goldmine in their time. Either way, self-pity looks good on no one but Sylvia Plath, so the investigative, narrative portion for this piece is coming to a close. Prologue | 38
On the empirical side of alcohol’s relationship with creativity, a study led by psychologist Jennifer Wiley at the University of Illinois tested the ability of tipsy men between the ages of 21 and 30 to solve what are known as Remote Associates Tests. While this sounds like the scientific name of bad office icebreakers, RATs are a tool for measuring creative thinking and processing. People are given a list of words, such as “lamp,” “office” and “scratching,” and must determine a word to pair with each that completes a common phrase — in this instance, “post.” In their trials, researchers found tipsy individuals solved more tests, and in a shorter amount of time, than the sober control group. The results suggest alcohol’s restraint on working memory contributes to heightened abstract thinking and the ability to piece together words imaginatively. So if some of the offthe-wall metaphors springing up in the last few paragraphs seemed concerning, rest assured there’s a scientific reason for them. However, it is important to note that a link between booze and RAT scores is hardly a solid foundation for the assertion that alcohol holistically fuels creativity. While it does, in moderation, seem to inspire imaginative metaphors and atypical word combinations, alcohol consumption is also detrimental to concentration and work ethic — two key components to the writing process. In fact, alcohol consumption does little more than rob you of valuable time, said Joanna Penn, a blogger and best-selling author of thriller novels. In addition to the dangers emphasized through the suffering and untimely deaths of famous, alcoholic writers, Joanna said she feels that use of alcohol above moderation prevents you from being who you are. And she should know. When she was in her 20s, Joanna had a drinking problem. It eventually led to her leaving behind life in London to escape and reflect. “I was sick in body and soul and spent three months in the Western Australian desert recovering,” she said. “The recovery time was creative; the drinking time was not.” Joanna said despite her feelings about drinking to excess, it is possible to enjoy alcohol without it harming your writing or well-being. It’s a sentiment shared by writer Jeff Goins, who feels our habits and personal traits are never to be confused with our inspirations and motivating forces. According to Goins, the societal marriage of alcohol use with creativity both dangerously romanticizes addiction and downplays the labor involved in the writing process. He feels the misunderstanding is a way for people to talk about the idea of creativity without actually having to practice the unpleasantries associated with it. In the face of preliminary scientific research and beliefs from popular culture, the link between alcohol and creativity should be taken at face value, particularly when attempting to move that relationship a step further by applying it to the literary world. As a society, we should be wary of 39 | Summer 2015
reducing the art of writing to merely raw creativity. While an imaginative spark is a vital component to the process, it is simply that — a component. To focus only on a deceased author’s substance abuse is to define him by a vice and to undermine his work, accomplishments and literary prowess. We must remember that creativity, inborn talent, continual practice, thankless effort and painstaking editing all merge to encompass writing as the backbreaking discipline it is. We must remember writing is a finely honed skill. We must remember it is a profession.
AUTHORS AFFECTED BY ADDICTION Ernest Hemingway
ften having the “write drunk; edit O sober” mentality falsely attributed to him, Ernest Hemingway is one of the most well-known alcoholics of the literary world. He published multiple famous novels, short story collections and non-fiction works before eventually ending his life in 1961.
William Faulkner
William Faulkner, one of the most renowned authors of the 20th century, was known for struggling with alcoholism; however, the author publicly stated that he didn’t write under the influence, and his drinking never influenced his creativity.
O. Henry
William Sydney Porter, mostly known under his pen name “O. Henry,” was a prolific writer of short stories and surprise endings. His drinking is said to have begun when he started writing for The Rolling Stone, and it continued until he died of cirrhosisof the liver in 1910.
Elizabeth Bishop
Elizabeth Bishop, an esteemed Pulitzer Prize winner and U.S. poet laureate, had a life marred by tragedy and alcoholism. In the peak of one of her binges, she reportedly resorted to drinking a bottle of eau de cologne after running out of liquor.
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. - Pride and Prejudice
The
BOOKSHOP
of Chapel Hill
What happens next? Explore the rest of the story: www.bookshopofchapelhill.com Prologue | 40
Closing the Worldwide Literacy Gap ILLUSTRATIONS & DESIGN BY MEGHAN MCFARLAND
Leveraging technology as a tool to educate the world’s illiterate 41 | Summer 2015
BY JANELL SMITH
I
n an age when everyone seems to have a mobile device and the world at their fingertips, it is hard to imagine that there are millions upon millions of people worldwide who wouldn’t know how to operate these devices. That’s partly because they don’t have access to them, but largely because they can’t read. To be considered fully literate in today’s world, you need to know more than your three Rs (reading, writing and arithmetic). You need to know how to use a computer. Without these skills, navigating and surviving everyday life and moving up on the rungs of our social ladders would be very difficult. Today, there are nearly 775 million adults who are considered functionally illiterate, meaning they have only a basic or below-basic literacy level in their mother tongue. Let’s put that into perspective:
If we gathered all the world’s functionally illiterate people, there would be enough of them to populate the United States, Australia, the entire continent of South America and most of the United Kingdom. For these adults, who are incapable of writing, reading and using digital information, life is unimaginable. In the developing world, affordability, access to food, transportation, even gender roles, determine whether or not you are literate. There are many barriers to receiving an education. If you are not forced to choose which child to send to school because you cannot afford to send them all; if your daughter is viewed as valuable outside of her household chores and in academic settings; or, if you are reading this article, consider yourself lucky. An education report released by the United Nations Education,
Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) last year, called the Education for All Global Monitoring Report, revealed that roughly 250 million children in the world’s poorest countries were unable to read at least part of a sentence. Although the study examined the quality of learning among the youth — children between the ages of 15 and 24 — in 37 countries, most of the illiterate children came from Arab states, SubSaharan Africa or South and West Asia. Perhaps more disturbing, in about one-third of these countries, less than a quarter of schools met teaching qualifications. “Access is not the only crisis — poor quality is holding back learning even for those who make it to school,” Irina Bokova, UNESCO director general, wrote in the report. The report wasn’t the first to raise the alarm. Recognizing that illiteracy and limited educational opportunities affect nations as a whole, world leaders drafted and agreed to six goals in 2000 that would ensure that the basic learning needs of all were met by 2015. Pauline Rose, director of the Education for All Global Monitoring Report, says we still have a long way to go. “And for adult literacy, we expect only 29 percent of countries to have all adults who are literate, so that is the goal that is furthest behind,” she said to Deutsche Well in a 2014 interview. “In lower secondary education, there has also been slow progress. There are still 69 million adolescents who are out of school with very little change since 2004.” Countries that have so many young people with little or no experience in school suffer profoundly. Many of the nations included in the survey lost billions of dollars because of unaddressed literacy problems. “The cost of 250 million children not learning the basics is equivalent to $129 billion, or 10 percent of
global spending on primary education,” the UNESCO report said. To achieve the goal of universal primary, basic education established at the beginning of the millennium by 2015, the report estimated that governments would need to recruit 1.6 million more teachers. So how exactly are nations rallying to address the problems of illiteracy? Multinational collaborations, such as the one among the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), World Vision and the Australian government, are providing grants to countries and organizations that provide low-cost, technologybased solutions. In February 2015, the All Children Reading: A Grand Challenge for Development competition awarded 14 grantees up to $500,000 in development funds. Innovators across the world were hand chosen because their programs “confront fundamental literacy issues and empower children to read,” according to the USAID press release. “More than 250 million children across the globe cannot read or write, representing a quiet crisis that is casting entire communities into a cycle of extreme poverty,” said USAID Administrator Rajiv Shah. “Through All Children Reading, we are rallying a global community of innovators to develop groundbreaking solutions to illiteracy — and in doing so, giving the world’s most vulnerable children a chance to seize their potential.” It might be interesting, then, to discover that this competition specifically seeks literacy solutions that involve technology and digital information as illiteracy combatants, not literacy deterrents. Prologue | 42
Illiteracy in the United States 1 in 4
children grow up without learning how to read.
2 out of 3
students who can’t read proficiently by the end of fourth grade will end up in jail or on welfare.
More than
More than
of inmates are functionally illiterate.
of inmates can’t read above a fourth grade level.
60%
70%
$$ $$ Nearly
85%
of those facing trial in the juvenile court system are functionally illiterate.
Long Beach, Calif., was ranked the country’s most illiterate city, followed by Mesa, Ariz., and Aurora, Colo. Sources: dosomething.org
43 | Summer 2015
Low literacy costs the healthcare industry over
$70 million every year.
In 2013, Washington, D.C. was ranked the most literate city for the third year in a row.
CLOSER TO HOME But what’s being done in the United States, where one in four children grow up without learning to read? While there may not be an international competition, there are smaller, but effective developments in the States. In 2010, in the heart of Los Angeles, Brendan Finch was working at John H. Liechty Middle School when his students’ struggles became magnified. The Teach For America alumnus was familiar with working in underserved communities, but he had never had an experience quite like the one he had that year. “I was a math and science teacher,” said Finch, “but that particular year my students — they only had one other teacher: their English-history teacher. There were 11 different people that were in that position throughout the year.” His students’ experiences encouraged him to create BirdBrain Science, the first BirdBrain Education online tool dedicated to delivering content that is at the reading level of individual students. “There was a bit of a crucible that BirdBrain was forged in,” he said. The constant teacher turnover was brutal for his students. In a school where 95 percent of the students live below the poverty line, students need consistency. Just like their international peers, illiterate children in the U.S. are by-products of poverty, parents who aren’t involved, health problems and other obstacles. Making matters worse, the kids had no Englishlanguage arts instruction that entire academic year. As the science teacher, Finch straddled two fences: to continue teaching science and to teach language arts and literacy skills. Finch was determined to help his middle schoolers in their struggle to read independently, but he didn’t have time in the classroom to follow that pursuit. He admits that his seventh-grade students were reading at a third- and fourth-grade reading level. “Our textbooks were completely useless to them, and there was nothing that I could give them so that they could learn about the complex concepts they were supposed to be learning about in middle school that was at their reading level, too.” What Finch did next could change the way that educators improve the literacy rates of their students. Finch, using whatever
free time he had, began to write engaging and readable articles for his students. The articles that Finch crafted were designed for the reading capabilities of each of his students, yet still maintained fundamental concepts and key terms about the same topic. “The defining moment was the first time I gave them one of our articles and they looked up - their eyes were glowing,” said Finch. For the next four years, Finch continued in his role as an educator. In his day job, Finch taught the required science curriculum. But at nights and on weekends, he donned a new hat, dedicating this time to creating new articles for his students. In these late night hours, Finch transformed from science teacher to “teacherpreneur,” a word he coined in his EdTech Digest article. The “teacherpreneur” is what it sounds like — a cross between a teacher and entrepreneur. “The ‘teacherpreneur’ represents the next stage in this evolution — teachers solving problems through scalable EdTech start-ups,” he said in the EdTech article. “We’ve lived through the systemic issues facing education and we’re able to use strategies that we know will work to solve them.” The idea that teachers can create solutions to the problems their students face was fundamental in establishing BirdBrain. With BirdBrain, concepts and ideas from a variety of subject areas, science for example, can be taught to the same the class by working with each student’s reading level. But BirdBrain doesn’t stop there. With continued use of BirdBrain, students are able to progress more than one reading level each academic year and could triple their independent reading. BirdBrain does this through its online platform When students first log onto the website, they are prompted to take a diagnostic
quiz. This quiz identifies their appropriate reading level, which will determine what articles they will read. From this point forward, students are continually tested. Following each article, students are quizzed to determine the best reading level of the next article. This system of constant reading and testing not only helps with comprehension but eventually improves the reading abilities of students. While BirdBrain staffers write original articles that include core concepts, terms and ideas at the various levels, there is a much larger and complex analysis at work. Because BirdBrain operates on an online platform, an algorithmbased technology allows BirdBrain to deliver varied content through the theory of readability formulas. According to BirdBrain, the formulas focus on the Zone of Proximal Development, which analyzes “the difference between what a learner can do without help and what he or she can do with help.” This analysis helps determine what the student is challenged by yet capable of doing. More than 70,000 students and teachers across the country have valued BirdBrain because it can find that gray area for students and help them grow. “Our most common piece of feedback is typically in all caps: I LOVE IT,” said Finch. Those frequently heard three words, plus the desire to drastically improve the literacy skills of underprivileged and low-performing students, have encouraged Finch to take the company to other subject areas: social studies, history and more. “Students deserve a tool that teaches the rigorous content they need to learn and gives them the skills they need to succeed beyond the classroom. Teachers deserve a tool to help them reach every student in their classroom and to save them time on grading and making sure their text challenges
both their most advanced and struggling students.” Much like the grantees in the All Children Reading challenge, BirdBrain’s tools are currently the low-cost curriculum tool on the market, at $4 per student per year. It is also easy to use, avoiding technology literacy problems. Finch is no longer teaching. Today, he devotes all his time to BirdBrain. “I think that the system we built and the results that we are seeing are fantastic,” said Finch. “Really what I think needs to happen is, we need to have more innovative teachers that have solutions in their classrooms that they’re using and are groundbreaking.” He says that through such people — those who are both teaching and creating solutions — is the only way the achievement, education and literacy gaps will be closed. “I spent seven years as a teacher — I’m a veteran,” he said. “I absolutely loved it and I miss the classroom, but — as I described to my students last year as I was leaving — here I can only help 150 of you. With BirdBrain I can help 100,000 students.” With this mentality, along with the help of other educators who are kickstarting low-cost education tools, Finch and others can reshape the world of education. It is refreshing to see that what could have been an obstacle, is actually being used to improve literacy. Technology has the ability to provide many different solutions to one great problem. That is the beauty of it.
Prologue | 44
45 | Summer 2015
FIFTY SHADES Why the effects of reading
aren’t so black and white BY JANELL SMITH
ILLUSTRATION & DESIGN BY LOUISA CLARK
Prologue | 46
W
hat is it about Fifty Shades of Grey that has captivated audiences worldwide? Obviously, the novel’s erotic sex has kept the trilogy abuzz since it was published by Random House in 2012. It helped E.L. James gross $95 million in 2013, making her the highest-earning author that year. The tantalizing sex also helped the British author land a major movie deal with Universal Studies and Focus Features. The movie raked in $100 million at the box office during the first week after its release in 2015. But, if the eroticism in Fifty Shades were stripped from the story, isn’t it at its core a typical romance novel? Girl meets guy. Guy is out of her league. Guy shows interest. They have sex. Girl falls in love. Guy doesn’t. The end... of the first novel anyway. Eventually, they both fall in love and live happily ever after. So the question remains: Why is Fifty Shades so wildly popular? Fantasy. Fifty Shades is wrought with fantasy — both Christian Grey’s fantasy of a sexually dominant relationship and Anastasia’s fantasy of a traditional, romantic relationship. The novel’s hot and steamy sex even creates sexual fantasies for its audience. According to two experts, Psychologist Denise Cummins and Professor Lewis Call, fantasy for both the novel’s own characters and the novel’s readers is largely responsible for the trilogy’s success. Even E.L. James, in a 2012 interview with the UK’s The Telegraph Media Group, said the book’s most powerful fantasy for women readers is its “passionate love story.” Fantasy, with its sometime muddied line between reality and imagination, has intrigued and befuddled everyone from Freud to Mariah Carey. It makes sense, then, that fantasy would lure in and trap 47 | Summer 2015
millions between the snares of desire and the quotidian. For better or for worse, America — if not the world — can’t get enough of the fantasy in Fifty Shades. Lewis Call, associate professor and history department chair at California Polytechnic State University and author of BDSM in American Science Fiction and Fantasy, said that E.L. James’ ability to create and elicit fantasy for and in her readers could be credited for the novel-turnedfilm’s success. “I think the fantasy — that you would meet this young, fantastically handsome billionaire who completely adores you and wants to make you into his sex slave and is entirely dedicated to that — in some ways is quite appealing,” Call said. “But as good as I describe that, we can instantly see how unrealistic that is. That’s never actually going to happen in anyone’s real life.” In James’ novel, Anastasia Steele, the novel’s blue-collar protagonist, is a senior at Washington State University Vancouver. She lives an unremarkable life until she meets Christian Grey. Grey, the feverishly hot 27-yearold millionaire and CEO of Grey Enterprises, wants Anastasia to be his next sex partner. Eventually, the couple falls in love, but not without drama. Grey wants a strictly sexual relationship, while Ana wants more. Eventually, Ana gets Grey to open himself up to love, and what follows is the typical American fantasy: love, marriage, children and a white picket fence. The book’s selling point — the fantasy and erotic sex — is what’s not so typical. James reveals early in the first book Grey’s dark and secret obsession with BDSM — sexual practices that include bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, and sadism and masochism. This dark obsession, a
result of Grey’s abusive upbringing, fuels the plot through the trilogy: Ana wants a relationship and all that it entails, but she doesn’t want to be submissive, nor does she want the abuse. In the first book, it’s clear that Christian is attracted to and, perhaps, wants more from Ana, but he is way too turned on by violent sex. Though fantasy may be the key to the trilogy’s success, it is also the heart of a big problem. Call worried that Fifty Shades’ readers may not recognize the fantastical elements in the story. “On some level (readers) may not recognize that it is pure fantasy, perhaps partly because it’s not Fantasy and Science Fiction,” Call said. “It’s set in something that looks very much like the real world. The problem with Fifty Shades is that that boundary between fantasy and reality is very blurry... People may be getting the message that this is something that I could have, this is something that could happen to me or that I could participate in.” In 2014, a study published in the Journal of Women’s Health by researchers at Michigan State University found that young women who have read Fifty Shades and other novels in erotica genres that include sexual dominance are more likely to have suffered from an array of relationship problems. Women between the ages of 18 and 24 who read at least the first novel of James’ trilogy were 25 percent more likely than nonreaders to have had a verbally abusive partner, 75 percent more likely to have had an eating disorder and 63 percent more likely to have five or more sex partners in their lifetime. Furthermore, women who read the entire trilogy are 63 percent more likely to binge drink. Amy Bonomi, chairwoman and
“
It is glorifying abusive relationships and traumatic bonding, and that’s the danger of it.
- Denise Cummins
professor in MSU’s department of Human Development and Family Studies, said in a statement that reading Fifty Shades may be dangerous for some women. “If women experienced adverse health behaviors such as disordered eating first, reading Fifty Shades might reaffirm those experiences and potentially aggravate related trauma,” said Bonomi. “Likewise, if they read Fifty Shades before experiencing the health behaviors seen in our study, it’s possible the books influenced the onset of these behaviors.” Bonomi added that it’s important to understand that the health behaviors assessed in this study are known risk factors for being in a violent relationship. Denise Cummins, contributor to Psychology Today and former psychology professor at the University of Illinois, said that many of the female readers of Fifty Shades are getting sensual gratification from the novel without understanding the underlying sexual, gender and
psychologically suppressive nature of the novel. “In Fifty Shades of Grey, what (readers) got introduced to was kinky sex,” said Cummins. “That in large part contributes to its phenomenal success, but the problem with Fifty Shades in the way that it is portrayed or described is that it lures young women into fairly abusive relationships.” The novel in its own way is a sort of pornography. Cummins suggested that reading Fifty Shades was in many cases a woman’s first exposure to implicit, nonvisual pornography. And this first exposure creates a psychological response that women may have never experienced before while reading. “Reading about these things or hearing about things seems to elicit the same kind of response men have when they watch visual pornography.” But this pornography isn’t the porno of taboo and overdramatized late-night flicks on HBO. Because it has been mainstreamed and
popularized, Fifty Shades has become America’s cultural fantasy — a new sex standard, which, for Cummins, is scary. “It is glorifying abusive relationships and traumatic bonding, and that’s the danger of it.” Cummins listed a variety of psychological problems that arise out of Fifty Shades: traumatic bonding, in which strong emotional ties develop after a person is showered with abuse and kindness from an abuser; the deterioration of self-preservation instincts in abusive relationships; the Stockholm Syndrome; predator-prey and other deep-seated primordial states that develop as a result of BDSM sexual encounters and tap into life-or-death instincts; and, autoerotic asphyxiation, which, like cocaine, becomes an addiction that hijacks the reward system in the brain. The novel, Cummins suggests, may rewire women’s brains and trick them into believing that they can and should save their damaged and abusive men. In fact, she vehemently warns that there is danger in believing that Fifty Shades is a romantic novel. “It’s changing what we think of in terms of a romantic relationship,” she said. “This is not a love story from the 1960s. This is not Casablanca or one of the things we held up as
Association Between Health Risks and Fifty Shades Exposure In 2014, a study published in the Journal of Women’s Health by researchers at Michigan State University found that young women who have read Fifty Shades and other novels with erotica genres are more likely to have suffered from an array of relationship problems. Every colored bar represents the percentage within each surveyed group that said they had experienced the relationship problem. Experienced Sexual pressure, begging or threats
Have had intercourse with five or more partners
Experienced shouting, yelling, cursing etc.
Source: Michigan State University
Prologue | 48
“
While people get caught up in the conversation of BDSM, what’s presented is a very narrow view of what human sexual relationships look like.
- Lewis Call
shimmering examples of love in extraordinary circumstance. This is quite damaging.” Fifty Shades is changing how we think about romantic relationships, and also how we think of sex. Chains and whips. Suspended apparati. A bed made for two, but not for sleeping. These are things that make up Christian Grey’s “Red Room of Pain.” His toy room is not cluttered with DVDs, cords or game consoles. Rather, and much like the novel, it reeks of bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, and sadism and masochism: BDSM. In a 2012 interview with The Guardian, James said that reading about BDSM, in addition to being a self-proclaimed “Twi-hard” (a diehard fan of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series), influenced the creation of the trilogy. “Well, I’d read a few things about BDSM, and I thought: this is hot!” she said. “I thought: what would it be like if you met someone who was into this kind of lifestyle, and you
didn’t know anything about it?” In that same article, James said that in writing the Fifty Shades books she received a lot of support from fans. “I get a lot of emails. Most of them say: ‘Thank you, I’ve fallen in love with Christian Grey, and my husband thanks you too.’ Which is code for: way-haa-aay! But I also get very moving ones. I’ll give you an example. ‘I was sexually abused as a child, and I’ve never enjoyed sex, but your books have liberated me.’” In spite of its success, the novel raises concerns not only about the portrayal of unhealthy and abusive relationships, but also about the inaccurate portrayal of BDSM. Some critics have argued that James’ research on BDSM was inadequate. In the past, BDSM was a taboo subject, but lately it’s begun to appear in popular TV crime shows. The danger in heightened visibility is the increased likelihood of misrepresenting the sexual practice. As more people readily recognize BDSM and are becoming more tolerant of it as an acceptable practice, the risk grows.
Although she does not support the BDSM lifestyle, Cummins agreed that the way James inserted BDSM into her novels was flawed. “There have been people from the BDSM community that have argued that it’s not accurately portrayed,” said Cummins. “At one point Christian decides to punish Ana, and it’s against her will.” Call, an avid proponent of BDSM lifestyle, says that consent is the heart and soul of BDSM, and he’s not the only one who thinks so. Most people within the BDSM community believe that consent, informed by desire and transparent communication, is what separates ethical BDSM from abuse. Call believes that BDSM can be a part of healthy relationships because it requires precise communication, reciprocity and equity. “The way that Fifty Shades portrayed consent is actually rather dangerous because the characters talk about consent, and they’re saying the right things about consent, but there are some very serious inequalities built into the relationship, and those aren’t really addressed,” Call said. “Anastasia is portrayed as very innocent and inexperienced. She’s meant to be a virgin when she meets Christian. He, on the other hand, has all this experience, not to mention wealth and power and privilege. It’s difficult or even impossible for the two
The Fifty Shades Trilogy Fifty Shades of Grey • Released June 20, 2011 • 514 pages • Over 100 million copies sold worldwide since its release
Fifty Shades Darker • Released April 17, 2012 • 544 pages • Reached #1 on USA Today’s Best Sellers list
Sources: Fifty Shades of Grey, Fifty Shades Darker, Fifty Shades Freed, Hollywood Reporter
49 | Summer 2015
Fifty Shades Freed • Released April 17, 2013 • 592 pages • Final book in the series
of them to even negotiate as equals.” Negotiation and communication are key to BDSM practices. There are rules and strict guidelines to which members in BDSM communities must adhere. Because of the high level of communication, boundaries are almost never breached. But this clear and concise communication was missing from Fifty Shades. For example, Ana and Grey have intense, violent sex though Ana has not signed the written contract Grey drafted.
“
“I haven’t signed,” I whisper. “I told you what I’d do. I’m a man of my word. I’m going to spank you, and then I’m going to f--- you very quick and very hard.” Tentatively, I uncurl my legs. Should I run? This is it; our relationship hangs in the balance, right here, right now. Do I let him do this or do I say no, and then that’s it?
Though Ana stays, it’s obvious that she is not consenting to what Grey is about to do to her. To Call, that means the novel’s portrayal doesn’t really look like a BDSM relationship. To Cummins, it appears that James is communicating something else: why women stay in abusive relationships. The social, financial and cultural capital that Grey has creates a power dynamic that both entrances Ana and makes her want to leave. But she doesn’t. Like so many other abused women, she’s trapped. “They’re afraid to leave,” Cummins said. “They have no self-esteem and no options, yet women are trying to save their men. They are convinced that they can save them from their own darkness.” Pathologizing Grey’s BDSM as a result of his traumatic childhood plays into the increasing misrepresentation of BDSM, and also into some of the psychological dangers Cummins talked about. “That’s how you tap into the compassion of Ana and of
the reader. The danger is that in the finale that they are happily married, she has saved her man from the darkness. Most women who go down that path end up losing themselves. It leads women to think that if you love your man enough you can fix him, and that’s not always true.” Call agreed. “The book has been mismarketed. The basic trajectory of the novel plays into traditional notions of gender and sexuality,” he said. “While people get caught up in the conversation of BDSM, what’s being presented is a very narrow view of what human sexual relationships should look like.” Whether or not Fifty Shades promotes violence against women or perpetuates inaccurate portrayals of BDSM, one thing is clear: It has not presented young women with viable examples of a healthy relationship. The novel is inhibited by a romantic plot, yet is muddied with sex. And we all know sex sells. But what, exactly, is Fifty Shades selling? Are women buying a romance story that unintentionally promotes violence against women and teaches a fundamentally flawed lesson in BDSM? If so, what can be done or undone? Bonomi, whose previous studies on Fifty Shades have found that violence against women is perpetuated in the trilogy, does not want the book to be banned. In fact, she believes that the depiction of violence against women is not necessarily problematic. “The problem comes when the depiction reinforces the acceptance of the status quo, rather than challenging it,” she said. And when the depiction is also marred by fantasy — when what is real and what is imagined are confused — it is difficult to determine what you should accept and what you should challenge. That, perhaps, is why the arguments for and against Fifty Shades are not so black and white.
Fifty Shades By the Numbers
Sources: BBC, Forbes, Variety
Prologue | 50
ILLUSTRATION & DESIGN BY KAITLYN KELLY
51 | Summer 2015
The tainted
truth
of memoirs How a genre rooted in fact sinks into fabrication
BY SARA SALINAS
Truth, for memoir readers, is what compels them to crack the binding and peel apart the pages of an author’s distinct narrative. But in cases
of fabrication, an altogether different truth reveals the falsehoods beneath the facts and shuts the book on a once promising, self-told tale. Prologue | 52
In mid-January, the literary world added another title to an already expansive list of debunked memoirs. Alex Malarkey co-authored The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven with his father in 2010. The “true story,” as qualified by the book’s front cover, purports to tell the story of a tragic car accident that left Alex facing death. But the memoir draws its name from the celestial events that transpired during Alex’s two-month coma, during which time the boy died, ascended to heaven, met Jesus and returned to his natural body — paralyzed at age 6. “The Boy Who Came Back from Heaven is the true story of an ordinary boy’s most extraordinary journey,” the publisher’s description says. The book quickly became a Christian best-seller, selling more than a million copies and spurring a made-for-TV movie. In its fouryear lifespan, the memoir served as nothing short of an awe-inspiring example of faith. On Jan. 13, 2015 Alex pulled the lofty tale back down to earth, writing an open letter retracting the entirety of the account. “I did not die. I did not go to heaven,” the letter reads. “I said I went to heaven because I thought it would get me attention.” In response to the abrupt confession, Tyndale House, the book’s publisher, announced it would stop all printing of the falsified memoir. “Initially, I think there was surprise that the boy came out and said that he had fabricated the story,” said Todd Starowitz, public relations manager for Tyndale House. Starowitz said in light of the revelation, the publishing house wasted no time halting production. “For us, it was immediate,” he said. “It was really kind of an easy decision in the fact that the book wasn’t true.” Starowitz said Tyndale vets each nonfiction book that comes through the publishing house, fact checking for authenticity. “We’ve had books that have come along and have been proposed to us that we’ve gotten 53 | Summer 2015
“
I did not die. I did not go to heaven ... I said I went to heaven because I thought it would get me attention.
– Alex Malarkey
pretty far into the process of starting a deal,” he said. “And there were questions that were raised, we just didn’t feel comfortable with certain authors or things like that.” The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven went through all the same protocols, Starowitz said, and in the end they decided to publish the book. While it’s a disappointing discovery, he said, it’s an opportunity for growth and improvement in the early stage of authentication. “I think absolutely we’re going to be more sensitive to digging into these stories a little bit further,” he said. And yet, Starowitz said he felt confident in the publishing house’s existing protocols. “I think people would be much more critical (of Tyndale House) if it came out and the kid said ‘this is false’ and we decided not to take it out of print, or if we didn’t do our due diligence upfront or anything like that,” Starowitz said. “You know, there’s a lot of publishers who publish nonfiction titles that unfortunately end up being not entirely factual.”
AN INDUSTRY’S FABRICATING HISTORY Memoir readers are all too familiar with the type of revelation that now haunts The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven. The last decade has seen one of the biggest memoir hoaxes in the genre’s history. James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces told a story of drug addiction and recovery, painting a sobering picture of the author’s less-than-sober livelihood. In 2005, the memoir made it onto The New York Times Best Sellers List and earned a coveted spot in Oprah Winfrey’s book club.
Six weeks later, the truth shattered Frey’s memoir into a million little pieces. Winfrey called the author back onto her show to question him on matters of truth and fabrication — matters Frey expressed little remorse for muddling. “Frankly, I don’t even care,” Frey told Vanity Fair in 2008. “I don’t care, if somebody calls [A Million Little Pieces] a memoir, or a novel, or a fictionalized memoir, or what.” Frey told Vanity Fair that as a young writer he dreamed of intrigue, not integrity. “That’s what I always thought I would do,” he said, “write about my own life in some way that, in the best-case scenario, would constitute art or literature. I’ve never had any interest at all in being a journalist or writing some sort of historically accurate autobiography.” With his fall from best-selling author, Frey joined a long list of historical memoir fabricators. As early as 1836, author Maria Monk penned her memoir documenting improprieties at a Canadian nunnery in Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk. Just months after the book’s publishing, a critical reader traveled to the locations featured in the book and found no evidence of prisons or mass graves as the account described. He found no evidence to substantiate even the skeleton of Monk’s account. The reader published his findings and pulled the first thread that would lead to the eventual unraveling of Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk. Following in Monk’s falsifying footsteps, countless memoirists since have seen their works discredited. Misha Defonseca, Margaret Seltzer, Davy Crockett and even
boxing champion Muhammad Ali put tainted pen to paper and concocted some, if not all, of their respective autobiographies. Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes told the story of McCourt’s woeful childhood plagued by early deaths and abusive parents, scoring the Pulitzer Prize in 1997. After the book’s publishing, residents of the story’s setting city identified 117 lies or inaccuracies, yet it’s still billed as a memoir on bookshelves.
TACKLING THE TRUTH Journalist Malcolm Jones was touring Ireland with McCourt when a disgruntled reader approached the author at a reading. “A guy came up and said, ‘You know, you made up this story about my sister,’” Jones recalls. Jones asked McCourt about the incident and, as he remembers it, McCourt responded, “That’s the way I remembered the story. What am I going to do? ... I hope I’m right.” The contested detail didn’t hold
much significance, Jones remembers; it was simply a difference of opinion. “He remembered it one way, this person remembered it another way, and that is probably going to happen.” Jones said he encountered similar uncertainty in writing his own memoir, Little Boy Blues, the contextualized story of his parents’ divorce against the backdrop of civil rights-era North Carolina. “The more you try to take a memory and sort of shape it into a story, the less it resembles the memory,” Jones said.
A History of Memoir Hoaxes
The Boy Who Came Back from Heaven By Kevin & Alex Malarkey
The most recent in the genre’s long-lived trend of fabrication, the memoir was revealed as false by the title boy himself. Father and son co-authors, Kevin and Alex Malarkey published the faith-filled account in 2010. For years, wife and mother Beth had denounced the memoir as untrue; in January Alex’s open letter validated her claims.
Angela’s Ashes By Frank McCourt
Author Frank McCourt outlines a childhood of abuse and familial hardship in his emotionally charged memoir. While McCourt has said the book recounts events as he remembers them, residents of the setting’s Irish town have said they remember things very differently. The book is still shelved and sold as a memoir.
A Million Little Pieces
Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk
First received as a shockingly honest tale of drug addiction and recovery, James Frey’s memoir wasn’t in the spotlight for long before it was revealed as false. Three years after publication, journalists at The Smoking Gun stumbled upon arrest records that didn’t match the book’s account and immediately began investigating.
Maria Monk’s 19th century account of corruption inside a Canadian nunnery remains one of the earliest memoir hoaxes on record. Not only were the book’s claims wholly unsubstantiated, but Monk didn’t even write the book — reports identify a group of men, all unaffiliated with the nunnery, as the true authors.
By James Frey
By Maria Monk
Prologue | 54
“You have to make your peace with that, if you’re going to tell what you think is a true story.” Jones said if there were details he couldn’t remember, he’d leave them out — a likely influence of his background in journalism. “There were no exaggerations,” he said. “And I tried really hard to concentrate on things that I knew — things that I did remember.” In researching his memoir, Jones said he paid close attention to the specifics of the time period. He even went back to an uncle’s country store to take photographs of the buildings, so he could better visualize the setting. “During that same visit, I
remember finding a church that my father’s family went to, and in my memory you could walk to that church from like, say, where one of my uncles lived,” Jones said. “Well in fact it was about five miles down the road.” Just one example, he said, of how fickle memory can be. “Your memory will play tricks on you,” Jones said, “and some of that you just have to make yourself OK with.” “You’re doing the best you can, but there are some things you can’t check, and you’re just going to have to hope that you got it right.” But memoirist Ken Ilgunas said he accepted a certain degree of compromise between truth and
creativity while writing Walden on Wheels, the account of his time living in a van in a parking lot at Duke University while completing his master’s degree. “One thing is our memories are just imperfect,” Ilgunas said. “Like our image of what happened five years ago is very different in our heads than what actually happened.” Ilgunas said he included a disclaimer at the front of his book for that very reason. The disclaimer acknowledges that he changed names to protect identities and altered the chronology slightly. “At one point I had some mice living in my ceiling upholstery — this was like the third or fourth
Memory & the Brain
Memory is often the fickle friend at the center of memoir scandals. An author documents not necessarily an event, but a memory of an event — however imperfect it may be. With all the areas of the brain involved in the memory process, it's no wonder details get lost along the way.
Three stages of creating memories
1.
Encoding
Frontal Lobes
Working and prospective memory
Perception Sensory memory
2.
Frontal Cortex
Storage
Spacial, navigation and declarative learning and memory
Short- or long-term memory
Temporal Lobes
Autobiographical memory
Cerebellum Procedural memory
Basal Ganglia Implicit memory
Amygdala Emotional learning
Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/
55 | Summer 2015
Mammillary Body
Recognition memory
Hippocampus
Spacial, navigation and declarative learning and memory
Repetition
3.
Retrieval Recall Forgetting
semester,” said Ilgunas, whose memoir only highlights his first two semesters at Duke. “I wanted to put that story in there, but yet it didn’t fit in chronologically. I didn’t want to keep it out,” he said, “so I incorporated that into my first year, even though that happened in my second year.” Ilgunas said he doesn’t feel bad about toying with chronology, but that he realizes different readers will have different opinions of how the changes affect the integrity of the memoir. Without periodical blog entries and email correspondence for reference, Ilgunas said he would have failed to keep a single event straight. “When it came time to write a book about it, I just borrowed very liberally from those blog entries,” he said. “Through those, I was able to maintain an unusual amount of authenticity and honesty.” While some writers boast the ability to recreate dialogue, aided by uncanny memories, Ilgunas admits his memory is substandard. “There were a few dialogues that are in the book that I completely recreated from memory, which I’m acknowledging is flawed,” he said. “I think some forgiveness is granted to the author as long as they’re not doing anything major.”
PERFECT MEMORY IN MEMORIAM Kelly Giovanello, a professor at the Cognitive Neuroscience of Memory Laboratory at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said what we know about memory is simple: It is fallible. “Memory is never an exact recording of the past,” Giovanello said. “It’s a highly constructive and reconstructive process.” In reactivating a memory, Giovanello said, the memory becomes more susceptible to change because new information is incorporated. “When we recall any event, whether it’s what we had for
“
Memory is never an exact recording of the past. It’s a highly reconstructive process.
– Kelly Giovanello
dinner two nights ago versus what place we may have eaten at during college years,” she said, “essentially one has to time travel back.” Giovanello said several factors affect the accuracy of memories, including emotional state, selfreference and the length of time since the initial event — all characteristics typical of memoirs. “The longer you are from when an event occurred, that is, the more you have to time travel back in your mind to that particular memory,” she said, “the more interference has come up over the years.” Giovanello said memoirs and autobiographical memories are particularly vulnerable to minor memory mistakes. Strong emotions, like those commonly associated with important life events, heighten the likelihood of memory distortion. It’s amazing anyone can write a memoir based on memory alone, she said, considering the emotions that are likely associated. Giovanello said memories are often distorted even a year or two after a particular event. “What’s interesting is that when you ask people about where they were, and who they were with, and what they were doing ... they’re actually not very accurate at giving you the information,” Giovanello said. “But what stays consistent is their confidence in that memory.” Confidence in the memory grows even as the accuracy of the memory decays. “So for me, that actually is another reason why memoirs might be actually more inaccurate than accurate,” Giovanello said. Denis Ledoux, the founder of The Memoir Network, said the first step in memoir writing is building a foundation of fact, and then
verifying what you believe to be true. “You have to, like a detective, doubt the information,” Ledoux said, “and prove it right.” Ultimately memory can be misleading, he said. There’s always a certain level of fiction among the fact. What matters, perhaps more than the actual truth, is the implication of it. Falling off a swing, for example, may not carry the same implication as committing a crime. “Those are very different truths,” Ledoux said. “And they carry different weight.”
DRAWING THE LINE Every memoir author draws the line between fact and fabrication. For Ledoux, it’s the consequence of the fact that determines its necessity for truth. But for Ilgunas, the lines between truth and toying are less defined. “The things that I played with were all incredibly minor,” Ilgunas said. “I think when you’re making stuff up, that’s too far.” Fabrication for the purpose of inspiring a reader carries more severity than exaggeration for the sake of humor, Ilgunas said. “There’s a ton of hyperbole — comedic hyperbole — in my book,” he said. “That’s why I was really careful about my disclaimer in the front. I just wanted to be open about it.” At the same time, Ilgunas said, the idea that a reader could take meaning from a memoir — from a personal story of trial and triumph — permeates every stage of the writing process. “When you’re writing, you want to make it dramatic and adventurous and engaging, and there is this undeniable temptation to play it up, and sometimes you do play it up.” Prologue | 56
a RIGHT TIME to WRITE BY ELIZABETH TABLAZON o set formula determines when to become an author. You could be a high school senior or a first-time dad. It can happen throughout months of waiting for an answer, or it could happen after one hour suddenly changes the direction in which your life is headed. The circumstances that surround a writer’s first book are distinct to each author, but there are new, unfamiliar experiences that debut authors share. From finding an agent for representation, to finding motivation through months of editing, to finally interacting with their readers, authors publishing their first books have stories just as intriguing and distinct as those of the characters they have fashioned.
Successful Debut Novels To celebrate these first-time authors, this timeline shows some of the most successful debut novels ever published. Sense and Sensibility Jane Austen 1811
57 | Summer 2015
Jane Eyre Charlotte Brontë 1847
Wuthering Heights Emily Brontë 1847
ILLUSTRATIONS & DESIGN BY KEELY MCKENZIE
“I DID IT FOR ME” Three years ago, now Columbia University junior Karen Bao was a senior in high school, waiting to hear back from colleges about admission decisions. To keep herself occupied with something other than applications, she began to write. “I was very unsure about my life because I didn’t know where I would go to college and even if I was ready,” Bao said. “To forget about that, I started writing about another girl with an unsure future. It ended up being this really quiet 15-year-old living on the moon.” The story became Dove Arising, a young adult novel that Viking Books for Young Readers released on Feb. 24, 2015. The book is the first in a series yet to be completed. Bao’s interest in science fiction and fantasy, which began in her childhood, played a significant part in the inspiration behind the plot. Her study of ecology and evolutionary biology at Columbia also contributes to the story’s scientific background. Bao’s first draft of Dove Arising took her about three months. She then contacted her middle school orchestra conductor, Simon Lipskar, who was also an agent at the literary agency, Writers House. One month after receiving Bao’s manuscript, Lipskar agreed to represent her. “We had a lot of editing to do,” Bao said. “The voice was there, the ideas were there, but a lot of the structure and logic was not.” She said she learned to plan ahead of time. “Inspiration is not enough. You also have to put in the work.” With the new experience of getting a book published came an unexpected challenge. Editing proved to be more difficult than Bao expected. “Getting your work picked apart by somebody with good intentions, but with a good eye, can get hard,” she said.
That somebody was Genevieve Gagne-Hawes, an editor at Writers House. Despite having to work through Gagne-Hawes’ 15-page edit letter that listed everything that needed to be corrected, Bao remained motivated by the story she felt she needed to get out into the world and by the individuals working alongside her. “For that to happen, I knew I had to sit down and get the edits done,” she said. “My editor … she was so excited to be working with me. She never got tired of reading the draft, and neither did my agent. Their constant cheerleading really kept me going. Even though the edits took a year, it didn’t feel that long.” Bao hopes that Dove Arising will communicate important things to readers: to take care of the earth, and to love science. “I don’t feel like there’s enough of that going around,” she said. “People can be very dismissive of scientists, and since it’s my life and I love it, I hope that people don’t see us as nerds or concocting potions in labs all the time. We’re really not like that.” As more people read Dove Arising, Bao anticipates having people engage with her ideas and the world that she created. She looks forward to conversing with readers about how they process the story. “People see things in it that I don’t, and I think that can be really fun.” Bao wrote the story of a girl living on the moon for herself. She invented another’s life story so that she wouldn’t worry about her own.
A Portrait of the The Hobbit Artist as a Young Man J.R.R. Tolkien James Joyce 1937 1916
Prologue | 58
“I did it for me,” she said. “But then when I finished, you know, this was actually pretty cool. … I never anticipated it turning into a career, but it looks like that’s the direction my life is going.” What was born out of an uncertainty of her future became the answer to her questions. Bao was going to be a writer.
“WRITING WITH URGENCY” Time adjusts for nobody. A minute is always 60 seconds long, an hour 60 minutes. Life, however, will do as it pleases with it. While Bao’s Dove Arising was born in the months she spent not knowing what the next few years held, author David Arnold knew just how different his life was about to be in a single hour. Arnold had been working on a few manuscripts but was focused on a career in music in Lexington, Ky., when he and his wife discovered that they were going to have a child. He immediately felt the need to write what would become Mosquitoland, which Viking Children’s Books published on March 3, 2015. “About an hour after my wife and I found out we were going to have a baby, it was decided I would be a stay-at-home-dad,” Arnold said. “This meant saying goodbye to my life as a freelance musician … and trading it in for a life filled with diapers and bottles and Bumbos.” Arnold spent two years
The Catcher in the Rye J.D. Salinger 1951
59 | Summer 2015
writing Mosquitoland, rewriting and getting critiques from trusted writing partners. In the process, he learned to slow down. “I’ve really tried to learn the difference between writing in a rush and writing with urgency,” he said. “Urgency requires intention and drive and a borderline obsession with focusing on content and character. … Writing in a rush will get you in all kinds of trouble. … Creating characters and setting and plot takes time, and when you rob those things of time, what you have left are shells and shadows.” Mosquitoland grew alongside Arnold’s son. It was ultimately his son who kept him motivated to keep writing. Arnold wrote between playtime and dance parties. While many stay-at-home parents try to sleep when their young children sleep, Arnold wrote. “Eventually, when he was old enough for Sesame Street, I wrote while he was busy with Elmo,” Arnold said. “I wholly transferred my creative energy from music to books and discovered a new love. I mean, I’d always loved reading, but until I really dove into writing, I didn’t know how much I loved it.” So Arnold took on the roles of both father and author, nurturing the lives of both his son and Mim, the character whose life he authored. Mosquitoland follows Mim as she travels through states in the midst of a family crisis, learning about herself, family and loyalty along the way. Arnold hopes that the honesty
Night Elie Wiesel 1955
To Kill a Mockingbird Harper Lee 1960
with which he wrote Mim’s story will resonate with readers. “I wrote Mosquitoland from a very vulnerable place – having said goodbye to what I thought would be a lifelong career, taking care of a baby, deciding to really tackle my novel, and then dealing with the inevitable guilt and frustration of having become a stereotype,” he said. “I set out to tell as honest a story as I could, with the most authentic character I could … and if a kid sees something of him or herself in Mim, I hope they see the value of friends and family and loyalty, the value of knowing yourself, even the value of pain and struggle because those are the things that make us – that, and how we get through them.” Just like Bao, Arnold is most excited about interacting with the kids who will read his novel. “I can’t wait to talk books with kids,” he said. “It’s a special kind of enthusiasm, and I just love it.” Arnold’s second book has a tentative release date of fall 2016. Writing takes time. But what that time looks like, or when it comes – is unique to every new author. ILLUSTRATIONS & DESIGN BY KEELY MCKENZIE
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone J.K. Rowling 1997
Kite Runner Khaled Hosseini 2003
Prologue | 60
61 | Summer 2015
A new take on judging a book by its cover BY SAMANTHA MINER Do you need help deciding what book to read next? Are you a fan of surprises? Does misleading cover art often lure you into purchasing a book that’s not what you thought it would be? The answer to all of your problems is simple: get set up on a blind date. A new trend of going on a blind date with a book is emerging as a means of book selection. The idea is that people select a book without ever actually seeing what book it is. The books are all covered with brown paper wrapping, similar to the brown paper bags you brought your lunch to school in as a child, completely blocking out the cover. A few key points are written in bullets on the brown wrapping, such as: fiction, young adult, love triangle, betrayal, murder, dogs; or family drama,
nonfiction, island, humor, summertime. The idea is that you take a chance based on liking select criteria available to you, as you would on a blind date. The blind date motif is probably why these events have commonly been held around Valentine’s Day or throughout the month of February. You pick the book, make the purchase or check it out if the date is taking place at the library, take the book home to unveil and then read. If the event is out of a library, most libraries offer a questionnaire when returning the book to rate the blind date experience in order to work out the kinks in the system – a kind of “Rate My Date” type of thing. Often, bookstores and libraries try to choose obscure titles rather than
bestsellers so readers have a chance to try out books they would typically not choose or find on their own. These venues are attempting to have readers discover a new favorite author or genre for which they would not normally go. While this trend isn’t universal, it is gaining steam. More and more libraries and bookstores are taking part in these types of events. You can now even be set up on a blind date with a book online through Etsy or various bookstore’s websites, like on the Australian bookstore chain, Elizabeth’s Bookshop’s website. The obvious caveat is that you might end up disappointed with your selection. Sometimes dates end up being duds, but there is a chance you could fall in love and find your new favorite book, author or genre.
Dimmick Memorial Library
Rockville Centre Public Library
Library director Susan Sterling realized that this could be a fun way to introduce library patrons to new books and authors.
Rockville Center Public Library enters participants in a raffle to win a “nifty date-night prizes” with each returned “Rate-a-Date” slip.
Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania
Milan Public Library
Milan, Michigan Milan Public Library’s first Blind Date with a Book happened for the first time in 2014 — just in time for Valentine’s Day!
Rockville Centre, New York
Bookshop Santa Cruz
Santa Cruz, California Bookshop Santa Cruz offers every kind of blind date you can imagine from humor to mystery, poetry to history, time travel to food writing.
Malaprop’s Bookstore and Café Asheville, North Carolina
ILLUSTRATION & DESIGN BY RACHEL ATWOOD
What could be more popular than hosting the American Book Associate’s 2015 Winter Institute? At Malaprop’s it might be their “Blind Date with a Bookseller,” section. Prologue | 62
Flipping the Script
Picture books for adults and picture-less books for kids BY JANELL SMITH
Over time, the mind has been conditioned to believe that a book with no pictures is, most certainly, text reserved for adults. Novels, essays, journals, reports: These are all designed for the mature mind, void of any visual stimulation other than black symbols on a white page and the occasional graph. These are forms of syntactical constructions too complex for the childish mind to grasp. Picture books, then, are reserved for children, whose young minds are too immature to understand language’s complexities without visual cues and aesthetic appeal. The idea that picture is for children and prose is for adults has been challenged before: In the Victorian era, illustrated books were all the rage. And when the tales and fables of the Grimm Brothers and Aesop are told to children before they fall asleep, children are absorbing not only complicated syntax, plot and language but moral issues, too. But, naturally, we fall back into traditional, ageist stereotypes of reading. Young
63 | Summer 2015
children read picture books. Adults read unillustrated novels. Two authors, Haruki Murakami and B. J. Novak, have interrupted this cycle and are challenging reading boundaries — one producing an illustrated novel for adults; the other, a picture-less children’s book for readers ages 5 through 8. They are flipping the script, turning a new page or returning to an old one, in a way that is unconventional and exciting for readers.
The Strange Library By Haruki Murakami
Illustrated novels have been a critical part of literature’s lengthy history. Charlotte’s Web, Bleak House, Vanity Fair, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland are all literary classics that owe part of their success to the illustrations that complement the crafted word. Lewis Carroll’s Alice, of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, poses the question, “What is the use of a book without pictures?” Chip Kidd, associate art director at Alfred A. Knopf, perhaps gives the best answer
to this question through the art he included in Haruki Murakami’s The Strange Library. As the designer for the novella, Kidd used illustrations to immerse readers into the wildly imaginative mind of the best-selling author, Murakami, as well as that of his protagonist. The novella tells the story of three people, “a lonely boy, a mysterious girl and a tormented sheep man,” whose lives intersect as they try to escape from a nightmarish library. Kidd captures the strange and hypnotic quality of Murakami’s works by infusing Japanese graphic and commercial art with retro, psychedelic features: pattern overlaying zoomedin photos of body parts — mostly eyes, lips and faces — and neon colors juxtaposed against muted tones. Kidd has illustrated Murakami’s front covers since 1993, so he has a clear understanding of the author. But he wasn’t trying to complement Murakami by telling the author’s story visually. Instead, Kidd wanted to “graphically play around with form and content so it surprises you.” That’s what good illustrations should do. They shouldn’t substitute for the author’s words, as author Henry James, who said the danger of illustration is “anything that relieves responsible prose of the duty of being,” feared they would. Rather they
should challenge the reader to analyze both the text and the illustration for a more complete understanding of the characters, plot development, setting, mood, tone and other literary tools.
The Book with No Pictures
By B.J. Novak
At 10:05 a.m., it might have been rather annoying to be in a room full of raucous children. But an author and comedian most widely known from his role in “The Office,” B.J. Novak, was not bothered by the children’s energy. In fact, he lived for their enthusiastic laughter. “I love getting a laugh,” Novak said in an interview with Vanity Fair. “There’s nothing more satisfying than getting a laugh from a kid because there’s no such thing as polite laughter, or social laughter.” In May 2014, Novak debuted his first children’s book, The Book with No Pictures, to a room full of wide-eyed kindergarten, first- and second-graders from Growing Up Green Charter School in Long Island, New York. “This is a book with no pictures,” he read. The children were at first quiet, calm and maybe even uninterested. Two pages later, Novak had captured the children’s full attention. “It probably seems boring and serious, except…” At this point faces jolted upward, necks strained to see the page, ears perked up.
“This is how books work.” What Novak revealed to the children about how books work might alter how younger children interact with books, especially books with no pictures. “Everything the words say, the person reading the book has to say.” The kids are completely and utterly engaged. The involuntary “blork” and “bluurf ” that Novak read caused a laughter the children could not contain. “At the school that the reading was at [in the trailer] — it’s a very orderly school,” he continued in his interview. “They had to calm the kids down after I read the line ‘Boo Boo Butt.’ They’re practically running around.” But it wasn’t just the hilariousness or onomatopoeic nature of the words that captured the children’s attention. The words came to life through vibrant colors and playful fonts. Novak intentionally omitted pictures from his book — he said wanted the kids to take special notice of the written word. “I wanted the kids to think, ‘What is this letter? What is this word?’” he said in an interview with The Atlantic. “I stuck to simple words and tried to have them repeat often on the page: the word “no”, the word “book”. I wanted to show kids, ‘This is the written word, and you’re going to love it.’” And love it, they did. At one point, Novak asked if he still had to read, and all the children issued a unanimous, “YES!” That made it crystal clear that all of the kids were actively engaged, and engaged without the need for
a picture or illustration. Penguin Books, which posted Novak’s book reading to the charter school students to its Penguin Kids YouTube account, said The Book with No Pictures “…inspires laughter every time it is opened, creating a warm and joyous experience to share — and introducing young children to the powerful idea that the written word can be an unending source of mischief and delight.” Because of this, The New York Times said the book was “the most conceptually radical” and is, not surprisingly, the only book of its kind. The children’s book, void of any illustration, ironically sat atop The New York Times Best Sellers List for Children’s Picture Books for 25 weeks. The book demands that the presumably older, adult reader is unforgivingly at the will of written word. For that reason, it instills in the young and jovial audience an understanding of the power of language, as well as an early development of listening, imaginative and comprehension skills in such a way that illustrated children’s book cannot.
Both of these works demonstrate that having variety in one’s reading makes for a better reader.
ILLUSTRATION & DESIGN BY ALEAH HOWELL
Prologue | 64
ILLUSTRATION & DESIGN BY KAYLA GOFORTH
BY ERIC SURBER The days of the marble warehouse of books, replete with curmudgeonly librarians, hollow space and the Dewey Decimal system are numbered — if not completely over. Yes, today’s libraries are not all about books. The 21st century library embraces technology, helping people make sense of the 65 | Summer 2015
computers, smartphones and digital readers we use everyday. “Libraries are here to support what people can do with information,” said Bill Derry, Director of Innovation at Westport Library in Westport, Connecticut. “The library used to be like a grocery store of information, and now it’s a kitchen.”
Westport Library was among the first public libraries to introduce 3-D printers. Last year, the library acquired two humanoid robots to teach computer-programming skills to the public. The robots “Nancy” and “Vincent,” which loosely resemble R2-D2 from Star Wars, mimic human movement and speak 19 languages. “We use them to teach coding,” said Maxine Bleiweis, Westport Library’s executive director. “Part of our mission and goal is to teach people what they need to know in the Digital Age.” The library offers free robotics classes, which Blieweis said have been well attended by the public. They had about 300 participants, nearly half female, attend the first session of classes, which taught the basics of robotic computer programming. The “Library of the Future” website, a resource from the American Library Association, cites the robots at Westport Library as a trend, saying “declining cost of sensors and computing power that allow robots to react quickly and intelligently will help robots become safer and take on greater roles alongside humans.” The ubiquity of robots parallels that of computers. Since the 1990s, computers have been available at public libraries, but as they’ve advanced, libraries are introducing more cutting-edge technology, like Nancy and Vincent. With these technologies, libraries are becoming epicenters for invention. “The best ideas come from all kinds of people — they come from places where there’s a lot of random learning, and that’s why the library is a great place of invention,” Blieweis said. Robots aren’t being used only for educational purposes. In fact, robots in some libraries are actually eliminating one of the basic jobs of a librarian: storing and retrieving books.
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The library used to be like a grocery store of information, and now it’s a kitchen.
Bill Derry
introducing bookBot
at James B. Hunt Library, N.C. State University
Robotic storage and retrieval systems have been used in shipping facilities and warehouses for almost two decades, but the technology was introduced to public libraries only about five years ago. The British Library unveiled one of the world’s first and most advanced robotic systems in 2009. It has the ability to store and retrieve about 7 million barcoded items. More recently, the James B. Hunt library opened at North Carolina State University in 2013 with “bookBot,” — a robotic system that can retrieve any one of 2 million books within minutes. The high-tech library was expensive, costing about $115 million, but the system has earned its keep. “It has never lost a book,” said Honora Eskridge, director of Centennial Campus research services at N.C. State University. “The machine can self-audit, meaning it inventories every book on every shelf, and Hunt library has never reported a missing book.” The system eliminates problems created by open stacks in traditional libraries. When the public is allowed to enter the stacks, books are inevitably misplaced and stolen. With really large libraries —
especially those on university campuses — it’s impossible to perform comprehensive inventories. Eskridge said in traditional libraries, it’s generally assumed that 20 percent of a library’s collection is lost or missing. BookBot ensures the collection is complete and eliminates the need for 10-digit call numbers. The robot orders books by size and not by genre or category, which means books aren’t permanently assigned to a shelf. The robot automatically sends returned books to empty spaces. And by ordering books by size, the robot takes 1/9th the space of traditional stacks. Eskridge said the greatest advantage of the robot is not its really fast high-tech retrieval, or that it keeps people from constantly sorting through the stacks. She said the greatest advantage is its ability to make more space for people. “At one point, there was so much space devoted to books, there was almost no room for people,” she said. “That’s what a library is about — space for people.” This is what Nancy, Vincent and bookBot have in common. The robots are really not about the technology; they’re about the people. Prologue | 66
Book Reviews
From fantasy to mystery, and even a biography, these book reviews has something to offer each reader. For our writers, each book had something different to offer. The Bone Season epitomizes good, mass marketable fantasy that all readers can enjoy. These Few Precious Days: The Final Years With Jack and Jackie gives readers an intimate, detailed, honest and biographical glimpse into John and Jackie Kennedy’s relationship while in the White House. Finally, E. Lockhart’s We Were Liars, a gripping mystery sure to keep readers on their toes until the end, is a must read for young adults and the seasoned reader that can’t be put it down.
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The Bone Season Series
By Samantha Shannon
$ 17.00
BY TAYLOR NOEL
E
ver since the conclusion of the Harry Potter series by J. K. Rowling in 2007, readers have been yearning for the next big fantasy series, and I think Bloomsbury Publishing has finally found it. In 2012, the small British publishing house offered a book deal to 21-year-old author Samantha Shannon for a seven-book series she began writing as a project while studying at Oxford University. Interestingly enough, it was Bloomsbury Publishing that offered J. K. Rowling a seven-book series in 1996. Coincidence? A combination of supernatural, paranormal and dystopian fiction, The Bone Season begins the chronicles of protagonist Paige Mahoney, a clairvoyant working for the criminal underworld in 2059 London. In this futuristic version of London, just being a supernatural is illegal. Citizens with any paranormal powers are arrested, never to be seen again. When Paige is captured one day after using her powers to defend herself, she encounters a world she never knew existed: The arrested voyants have been sent to a prison in Oxford before being transported to a secret city controlled by an otherworldly, superior race called the Rephaim. In Sheol I, the name of the penal colony, Paige is claimed by a Rephaim named Warden who will coach her through a series of deadly challenges to prove her supernatural talents. Paige refuses to accept this new reality and attempts to organize a rebellion. For those who love science fiction and fantasy series, The Bone Season only affirms that well-done novels in this genre are the best things to read. This story has everything — an entire alternate universe, stunning and unique extraordinary characters, a dynamic and engaging plot, a sense of magic and wonder, and a little romance to top it all off. The greatest strength of this novel is Shannon’s remarkable ability to create such a complex, vibrant new world. Shannon
Bloomsbury Publishing
480 pages
$ 25.00
Bloomsbury Publishing
527 pages
Prologue | 68
has essentially created a new language to describe the new races and paranormal powers. By layering supernatural and dystopian elements on top of existing, real places in London, Shannon is able to build an entire world. It did take me a little while to adapt to the jargon of this new world and to keep up with the hierarchical system, but once I was able to immerse myself in the world, these elements only made the story that much more engaging. For a story that is completely fictional, it was strangely convincing. Character development is another important asset. Paige is incredibly easy to like and to champion throughout the book. Her feistiness and her determination are endearing. Shannon does a great job of really fleshing her characters out and giving them such a range of characteristics that they almost feel real. Shannon takes the best elements from successful writers, like Suzanne Collins and Margaret Atwood, and adds her own fantastical foundations to produce a series that is completely consuming. I was reluctant to extract myself from Shannon’s world after reading the first book. Thankfully I didn’t have to wait long to re-enter the universe Shannon so adeptly fashioned. A fantastic continuation of The Bone Season, The Mime Order was released in February 2015. Because the second book fluidly picks up where the first left off, I don’t want to give anything away. The reviews below, however, give you an idea of how exceptional The Mime Order is. Library Journal said, “Full of the action, turns, and surprising revelations that readers have come to expect from Shannon, this new installment ends on a wholly unexpected twist.” USA Today said, “While Bone Season was filled with action and exposition . . . betrayal and political intrigue take over in the excellent Mime Order. If anyone was wondering how Shannon would stretch this story into seven books, the gut punch of the last line in The Mime Order will instead have them on tenterhooks for the next five.” And Kirkus Reviews said, “Her legion of fans will once again be here for the propulsive plot.” So head over to your local bookstore and get your copies of The Bone Season and The Mime Order today. You won’t be able to put them down. 69 | Summer 2015
We Were Liars By E. Lockhart BY SAMANTHA MINER
W
e Were Liars is a young adult novel about Cadence Sinclair Eastman, a teenage girl from a privileged New England family who has amnesia, and her summers spent on her grandfather’s private island off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard. The novel follows Cadence through flashbacks to her summers spent with her family on the island as she attempts to figure out what her family is hiding from her. The premise of the novel is that Cadence suffers a traumatic accident, losing her memory of the summer leading up to the incident and a period shortly after, and the stories she is told from her family surrounding her accident and final summer on the island don’t entirely line up. Cadence returns to the island in an attempt to reconstruct the events of her final remembered summer with the help of fragments of information from her grandfather, cousins and three aunts. “No one is a criminal. No one is an addict. No one is a failure.” This is the first of many strings of lies told in the course of the book. The storyline is confusing because of holes in Cadence’s knowledge, yet perfectly suited to the plot. It’s a quick, easy read with depth that you can fly through. The reader is tugged along by the pull of teen romance, countless lies and the mystery of the island circling this wealthy family. We Were Liars is skillfully written through the eyes of an unreliable narrator, in the voice of an intelligent teenage girl. It is believable but does not push the limits. The narrator speaks in the exact terms that teens feel: Everything is a metaphor, steeped in emotion and entirely overwhelming. The answer to Cadence’s mystery is so strikingly obvious, yet the reader never sees it coming until the very last minute when it’s revealed. We Were Liars is one of those books that makes you almost hate the author at the end because of how duped you were and how ultimately frustrated you are that the outcome you were subconsciously praying for wasn’t true is.
These Few Precious Days
By Christopher Andersen
$ 17.99
BY ERIC SURBER
T
hese Few Precious Days by Christopher Andersen is a biography that takes an intimate look at the Kennedys’ final year in the White House. Andersen focuses on the time when Kennedy was in office, but the nature of his storytelling often takes readers beyond just the “few precious days.” Careful research and reporting reveal themselves throughout the book. Several direct quotes from their discourse present the Kennedys as relatable people with real emotions, both good and bad. For example, Andersen writes: “There was one group that Jackie tried but failed to get barred from all state dinners — the press. ‘Their notebooks bother me,’ she sniffed in a memo to Tish Baldrige. ‘I think they should be made to wear big badges and be whisked out of there once we all sit down to dinner.’” It’s honest moments like these — when Jack and Jackie aren’t cloaking themselves in political correctness — that make this biography exceptional. Andersen includes the good, the bad, the ugly and, occasionally, the extremely ugly aspects of the Kennedy presidency Readers will learn that both Jack and Jackie were addicted to amphetamines, relying on questionable injections from Dr. Max Jacobson. Jackie was a chain smoker, and Andersen unabashedly discusses Jack’s many affairs. A word of warning: The biography’s cultural references and mentions of lesser-known politicians may be confusing to younger readers, and most readers will likely benefit from having an online dictionary close at hand. Anyone fascinated by Jackie’s cultural or JFK’s political leadership will appreciate the real-life look at their complicated life together. These Few Precious Days brings the final years and tragic events of Kennedy’s presidency to life in the 21st century.
Delacorte Press
240 pages
$ 27.00
Gallery Books
336 pages
Prologue | 70
Follow for a Story BY ELIZABETH TABLAZON
Author uses Twitter to publish story and enhance narrator’s point of view. DESIGN BY KEELY MCKENZIE
@jaybushman tweets
17K
@goodcaptain tweets
37.9K starting tweet
Nov. 2, 2007 ending tweet
Feb. 29, 2008
Twitter’s 140-character limit on each post may not seem like the most efficient way to publish a short story, but writer and innovator Jay Bushman makes the most of it. Bushman has been using the social medium to continually publish The Good Captain (@goodcaptain), his sci-fi adaptation of Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno, since November 2007. As a screenwriter, Bushman grew frustrated with trying to sell his work the traditional way. He soon recognized the value of using the Internet to broadcast his writing. “It was a really interesting time for creators on the Web because people were just starting to figure out that you could put content online and give it away free to an audience, and that would actually help you in the long run.” He was especially enthusiastic about using Twitter as a medium to tell a story because he didn’t need to consult anyone and didn’t have to pay to use the site. The Good Captain’s first broadcast concluded in February 2008. When he started, Bushman manually tweeted out lines of the story. It was not until last year that he invested in the creation of a Twitter management application that would formulate the content of a tweet and its place in the sequence of tweets, as well as the specific times between tweets going live. The application publishes lines of The Good Captain as tweets and automatically starts all over again once it reaches the end. BY ELIZABETH TABLAZON
Bushman perceives the 140-character limit not as a hindrance to his storytelling, but as a cultivator of his creativity. He compares it to the art of drawing and writing comics. Scott McCloud, author of Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, wrote that comic books work because they allow readers to see movement between static images. “Put those two (images) together and (you) create in their mind the movement between those two static 71 | Summer 2015
images,” Bushman said. “The space between the images is where the story gets it power,” Bushman said. “To me, that’s how Twitter works. … It’s about a sequence of short little bursts and what comes in between them.” Bushman said readers add meaning through their thoughts between tweets. “You can use irony and juxtaposition – that you can do because of the space in between the 140 characters,” he said. “I barely worry about 140 characters. BY ELIZABETH TABLAZON
To me, it’s not an issue because I’ll use as many tweets as necessary to tell the story.” Bushman decided to use Twitter to publish The Good Captain because the medium itself helps portray the story. His adaptation is based on Benito Cereno, a story with an unreliable narrator, and the anonymity that Twitter provides enhances the narrator’s unreliability in The Good Captain. “The story works because you’re seeing what the narrator tells you even though the narrator is completely and terribly wrong,” Bushman said. “It’s interesting to use Twitter … when you’re following someone’s Twitter account, you’re not there too. I thought it would be an interesting way to delay the moment in the story when the audience realizes, ‘Hey, wait a minute. He’s not accurately describing what’s around him.’” The biggest challenge Bushman faces in tweeting his stories is pinpointing where to split an idea to fit the space allotted. “Where is the point in this where you split something up?” he said. “You’ve got one idea moving to the next idea. You have the first part of an idea with an ellipsis … trying to figure out where the pauses go is basically where most of the work is — dividing a larger piece into smaller chunks.” To help address the requirement, he uses a specifically designed Microsoft Word document that uses fixed-width fonts and a particular margin so that 140 characters comprise exactly two lines of text. Bushman has published other projects through unconventional media, including The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, a multiplatform modern adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. He presented the piece through fictional vlogs on YouTube. BY ELIZABETH TABLAZON
To keep up with Bushman’s latest projects, follow his Twitter account, @jaybushman.
Prologue | 72
k o o B e h t v y b t o N [Clubs] BY SARA SALINAS
Once upon a time, book clubs consisted of grannies in rockers, jilted housewives or stay-athome moms filling the time — and their wine glasses — until the kids get off the school bus. But book clubs have evolved into unique social
experiences, adding plot twists to the regular program. Literature nuts across the country have designed their own clubs to deviate from the script. Here are four not-so-by-the-book groups that are rewriting the story on book clubs.
BookWorm Mafia
SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS
Since its humble beginnings, BookWorm Mafia has earned local celebrity as the badass book club of San Antonio. “It’s strange how many people know who we are in the city,” said Tommy Scialpi, an administrative member of the group. Scialpi said while the club’s semimonthly meetings are relatively routine, it has built a presence in San Antonio through free BookWorm Mafia swag. Scialpi said he’s walked down the street and been recognized as his book club alter ego, “Tommy Atomic.” “I almost feel like it’s become like a cool thing you know. Like book clubs in general have become this cool thing over the past few years, where people like to say that they read.”
Delicious Reads When Kelly Dearth started Delicious Reads nine years ago, it was the picture of an average book club. But when attendance started dwindling, Dearth revamped the Utahbased club, making each month a party — complete with decorations, costumes and book-themed menus. “We basically treat every book as a party,” Dearth said. “We don’t just discuss it. We do everything we can to celebrate every book that we read.” The group has thrown a Frenchthemed party for Julia Child’s autobiography, My Life in France, a circus-themed party for Erin Morgenstern’s magical realism novel, The Night Circus, and even a murder mystery party for Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None. “I’ve always felt like books were these adventures, and you meet so many characters, and it’s just a world you want to live in. And so reading them is great, but it’s so much more fun if you can live it.” 73 | Summer 2015
LEHI, UTAH
PHOTO BY SUMMER NICOLE PHOTOGRAPHY
A Delicious Reads monthly meeting in honor of Julia Child boasts French cooking, pearls, aprons and of course a discussion of the party’s literary inspiration.
PHOTO BY SUMMER NICOLE PHOTOGRAPHY DESIGN BY KATHLEEN HARRINGTON
Books & Bars
MINNEAPOLIS, ST. PAUL & EXCELSIOR, MINNESOTA
Eleven years ago founder Jeff Kamin brought the intimate discussion of a book club meeting outside the confines of a living room and into the Minnesota bar scene. Books & Bars hosts three public forum-style meetings each month in three Minnesota towns. A typical meeting will draw in anywhere from 40 to 100 people depending on the location, which can make facilitating a discussion difficult. But Kamin said alcohol and anonymity help newcomers feel comfortable. “It’s fun. It’s very social … You don’t have to know anyone. You can just show up and join in, and by the end of it, you’ll know some people.”
PHOTO COURTESY OF BOOKS & BARS
Jeff Kamin spends meetings running a microphone between engaged readers to the club’s next volunteer commentator.
The Walking Book Club The Walking Book Club pairs fitness with fiction (and sometimes nonfiction, too). The group meets weekly, splitting its time between walking and discussing the month’s book. Founding member Nancy Haggard said half of the group’s eight members are original, a testament to the club’s six years of success. “We have time for socialization as well as book discussions, so I think that has really strengthened the bonds between the ladies in this group.” The weekly discussions of a monthly book means roughly four discussions of the same piece, which Haggard said allows for delving into the details. “We’ve had a few nights where it was like 90 degrees still at 7 o’clock at night during the summer … But no, I can’t think of a night where we ever did not walk. We’ve always walked.”
ELGIN, ILLINOIS
PHOTO COURTESY OF THE WALKING BOOK CLUB
Club members enjoy the sun-filled first half of their weekly meetings: walking as a group, or two, before sitting down to debate the details of that month’s book.
Prologue | 74
BY TAYLOR NOEL
F
or bibliophiles, bookworms and all around book lovers alike, walking into a local independent bookstore on a Saturday morning armed with a coffee and a new book is a feeling like no other. There are so many reasons to love an indie bookstore. Sure, I understand the convenience of shopping for books while sitting on the couch in your pajamas. And, I understand the appeal of chain bookstores that stock thousands of books. There is certainly a place in the world for Barnes & Noble or, dare I say, even Amazon, but there is a bigger place for the hole-in-the wall bookstores. Independent bookstores are owned
75 | Summer 2015
ILLUSTRATIONS & DESIGN BY LOUISA CLARK
and managed by someone from your community who is hiring booksellers in your community, thus providing local jobs. The booksellers working at the store genuinely love their jobs and are more than happy to talk to you about your favorite book for hours. If you want a recommendation, these are the people who know books best. Amazon’s recommendations are based on computer algorithms, while local booksellers will recommend books that they have loved reading and sincerely believe you will enjoy. Each independent bookstore has a different atmosphere. Every Barnes & Noble I walk into looks the exact same. But, every independent bookstore I walk into has its own personality that reflects the community it serves. Kramerbooks & Afterwords Café in Washington, D.C., has a very different atmosphere from Politics & Prose, also in D.C. These bookstores are within a 45-minute drive of each other, but they cater to different kinds of book buyers. Kramerbooks is overflowing with books nestled on mismatched tables and books crammed into shelves that hectic customers rummage through. Politics & Prose has a calmer and more relaxed atmosphere with books spread spaciously across the store in a neater, more orderly fashion. Authors generally have great,
personal relationships with the bookstores in their area. Renowned young adult author Sarah Dessen even did an event with her local bookstore, Flyleaf Books, during which she worked as a bookseller for a day. Independent bookstores often have calendars chock full of author events. Who doesn’t love a signed, personalized copy of a book by a favorite author? I met Khaled Hosseini when he visited my local bookstore last summer, and it was a magical experience. Many independent bookstores are located next to cafes or wine bars that let you bring drinks into the store while you look around – some even provide it for you during a books and booze event. Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill sponsored a Whiskey Tour in which three authors traveled to bookstores across the country to drink and talk books with readers. Then there are those wonderful bookstores that have cats or dogs lounging around for you to enjoy. I’ve heard that one bookstore even has a pet chicken running around. Wild Rumpus in Minnesota has a pet chinchilla and a pet ferret. In an effort to lure you Barnes & Noble lovers out there to become indie bookstore lovers too, I suggest you visit the best independent bookstore in your state.
AL – Page and Palette in Fairhope AK – The Homer Bookstore in Homer AZ – The Poisoned Pen Bookstore in Scottsdale AR – WordsWorth Books & Company in Little Rock CA – Vroman’s Bookstore in Pasadena CO – Tattered Cover Bookstore in Denver CT – Broad Street Books in Middletown DE – Bethany Beach Books in Bethany Beach FL – Books & Books in Coral Gables GA – Bound to be Read Books in Atlanta HI – Kona Stories in Kailua-Kona ID – Rediscovered Books in Boise IL – Myopic Books in Chicago IN – Viewpoint Books in Columbus IA – Prairie Lights Books & Café in Iowa City KS – Rainy Day Books in Fairway KY – Joseph-Beth Booksellers in Lexington LA – Maple Street Book Shop in New Orleans ME – Longfellow Books in Portland MD – Atomic Books in Baltimore MA – Harvard Book Store in Cambridge MI – John K. King Used & Rare Books in Detroit MN – Magers & Quinn Booksellers in Minneapolis MS – Square Books in Oxford MO – Dunaway Books in St. Louis MT – Shakespeare & Co. in Missoula NE – A Novel Idea Bookstore in Lincoln NV – Sundance Books and Music in Reno NH – The Toadstool Bookshop in Keene NJ – The Town Book Store in Westfield NM – Bookworks in Albuquerque NY – Strand Bookstore in Manhattan NC – Malaprop’s Bookstore in Asheville ND – Main Street Books in Minot OH – Ohio Bookstore Inc. in Cincinnati OK – Full Circle Bookstore in Oklahoma City OR – Powell’s City of Books in Portland PA – Baldwin’s Book Barn in West Chester RI – Symposium Books in Providence SC – The Beaufort Bookstore in Beaufort SD – Prairie Pages Bookseller L.L.C. in Pierre TN – Parnassus Books in Nashville TX – South Congress Books in Austin UT– The King’s English Bookshop in Salt Lake City VT – The Vermont Book Shop in Middlebury VA – Fountain Bookstore, Inc. in Richmond WA – Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle WV – Taylor Books in Charleston WI – The Reader’s Loft in Green Bay WY – Night Heron Books in Laramie Prologue | 76
BY DANNY NETT
ILLUSTRATION BY TOM MCLAUGHLIN DESIGN BY KAITLYN KELLY
77 | Summer 2015
From ene mriter, strouggling wtik dyslexia lod to kis love from langubgo
Details of Dyslexia
For one writer, struggling with dyslexia led to his love for language
Dyslexia is not easily defined
From standardized tests, to professional emails, to a street sign on every corner — we live in a world made for readers. For the estimated 15 to 20 percent of the population with dyslexia, even the day to day can turn into a daunting maze of wandering letters and jumbled type. “For me, it’s not that words melt away on the page or anything so much as it’s just a random collection of words that seem to have no meaning — as if they don’t belong together,” says Tom McLaughlin, a children’s book author living in Devon County, England. His pieces, including Captain Buckleboots, A Brief History of Tim and The Diabolical Mr Tiddles, sport whimsical cartoon figures garnished by light, easy-to-read quips. His work was featured by the likes of Puffin Books and Cartoon Network, McLaughlin and his success have a surprising catch: He was diagnosed as dyslexic nearly 20 years ago. “…One of the problems with dyslexia (is that) it’s such a huge, catch-all term. It affects one person completely differently to another,” McLaughlin says. “As a result, nothing was really done about it for me at school. My diagnosis explained my struggles, but it didn’t do anything to address them.” With very little formal treatment, McLaughlin feels his unique way of sensing the world has offered a valuable perspective in his writing and illustrating. It took him years to overcome, but once he stopped shying away from his diagnosis and got over his feelings of inadequacy, he found that explaining dyslexia to others is a liberating and cathartic experience. “It’s like being a member of a special club,” McLaughlin says. “It teaches you as much about yourself as it teaches it to others.” This published author says to make sense of the world, dyslexic people
are forced to think and problem solve in unorthodox ways — something he believes society needs to see more of. “I heard the other day that (British intelligence agency) MI6 even especially recruits people who are dyslexic. If dyslexia is good enough for James Bond, it’s good enough for me,” McLaughlin jokes. McLaughlin, whose portfolio is home to more than a dozen human and animal characters, got his start as a political cartoonist. While cartooning had its enjoyable moments, his specific dyslexia made it difficult for him to work in such a fast-paced field. Six years ago, he moved to the world of picture books, where he is now able to take his time and develop ideas at an enjoyable pace. “Some days are worse than others, but I always tend to find reading harder than writing. In some ways, as ridiculous as this sounds, writing a book is actually easier than reading one,” he says. Dealing with dyslexia and its accompanying insecurities is a challenge, but it’s one that has made McLaughlin better. His unique experience helped him approach life differently and creatively. “Take the time to find out the benefits of being dyslexic,” he says. “Yes, it’s a struggle, but the older I get, the more I realize that it’s just as much a cause of positivity as it is for negativity.” The unique perception McLaughlin has is something he values greatly as a writer. It is just a bonus he can acknowledge the irony in it all: a learning disability providing him with imaginative ability, a difficulty with reading driving him toward publishing. “Whether you can spell or use an apostrophe is really neither here nor there — writing is just about having something to say.”
DEFINING DYSLEXIA According to the International Dyslexia Association, dyslexia is marked by “difficulties with accurate and/or fluent word recognition and by poor spelling and decoding abilities.” Because of this, it is classified as a language-based learning disability rather than a disease and manifests itself in different ways among individuals. The variance in effects and the lack of understanding surrounding dyslexia can lead to confusion with identifying and diagnosing the disability.
DYSLEXIA’S EFFECTS
Dyslexia differs from person to person
• Characters appearing jumbled or mismatched • Words running together or drifting across the page • Issues with spoken language and comprehension • Difficulties expressing oneself • Trouble with reading retention
DISCOVERING DYSLEXIA Find helpful resources here
• http://eida.org/ • https://www.understood. org/en/tools/through-yourchilds-eyes • http://www.ncld.org/
While management methods are typically catered to an individual’s own situation, a common goal is to provide people with dyslexia the skills and knowledge to navigate language effectively. Prologue | 78
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