February 2011

Charles Blackstone

features

An Interview with Gina Frangello

When Gina Frangello was last interviewed for Bookslut, nearly seven years ago, she hadn’t yet published her first novel, My Sister’s Continent, nor had it received the accolades it would in these pages and beyond. She was the executive editor of an acclaimed Chicago-based literary journal, Other Voices, which, among its decades’ long history, had published in 1999 a short story of Pam Houston’s that went on to appear in Best American Short Stories of the Century, selected by John Updike, and, as though that wasn’t enough, also taught college writing classes.

In the years that have racked up faster than either of us might readily admit, Frangello has continued to keep an awe-inspiringly breakneck schedule. Though the print magazine has shuttered, she now serves as executive editor for its book imprint, which she founded, OV Books. She edits the fiction section for The Nervous Breakdown, a fairly recent addition to the liternet, but already, and in large part to Frangello’s curating, a formidable compendium of literary demons (and saints). As a writer, in addition to her well-received first novel, she’s put out a short story collection, Slut Lullabies, last spring, which Vanity Fair resoundingly proclaimed “will seduce you.” Another novel is on the way.

Last year she won a fiction award from Summer Literary Seminars, judged by no less than Mary Gaitskill. The first-place prize, which she got to redeem two months ago, was a chance to travel to and study in Kenya. I caught up with Frangello one late morning in January, several weeks after she’d returned to the States, at a diner called Kitsch’n, a few blocks from her home in Roscoe Village. It was snowing heavily that day. We were recorded by a sound engineer I’d hired from a Craigslist post -- and paid in brunch and a couple of bottles of tequila. Frangello and I had drinks -- I Jameson neat, she a margarita -- and chicken and waffles, and we talked about her recent trip, her discoveries about the Kenyan scene, being a writer in Chicago, and how exactly it is that, in spite of her myriad commitments, she always has time to hang out with me for early-hour cocktails and conversation about books and the rapidly evolving publishing industry that never fails to seduce me.


Are we actually being recorded?

I think so.

[Laughs]

I guess we should begin. I don’t really have much. The Word-of-the-Day today -- do you get that? From Dictionary.com? -- it’s autoschediastical...

All right.

Which is something improvised or extemporized...

All right! That’s us!

Which I thought was perfect for today. So, we’re here at Kitsch’n, this is Gina Frangello, and I’m Charles Blackstone, in case I forget. Did you ever listen to Don Swaim?

No.

He had Book Beat, on CBS radio, in the eighties, and there’s an Ohio University website that has .wav files of all these interviews, hundreds of interviews he did with writers.

Oh, cool. God, I didn’t know anything about it.

It’s fascinating. I’ve gone through a lot of them. He has two with Carver, and one with Joyce Carol Oates I’ve listened to more times than anybody would deem appropriate.

[Laughs]

I wanted to see what his first question was, to people, and I just did a random sampling, and I went to Carver -- some of them just like start oddly, like the recorder took a minute to go on, so there’s no beginning. One of the Carvers is in the middle of Carver talking about Yakima [Washington], so the question maybe is, “Where did you grow up?” but you can’t tell. The one with Toni Morrison and then the second one with Carver both began with, “When was the last time I saw you?” and they’d been at, you know, like a PEN conference or something. So, I thought, perfect to begin with, when did we last see each other, because it was right before...

Yes, it was right before...

Right before you took a big trip...

I went to Kenya. Maybe a week before I went to Kenya. It was really close. And we were at May Street Café, planning [novelist and short-story writer] Cris Mazza’s release party, and like...

Which we’re excited about.

Which we were excited about. And we kept calling her on the phone, and like trying to pin her down to a date, when we could finagle the most people from UIC to get there. And we ate free, and life was good, and then I was off to Kenya. Yeah.

But so in Kenya, there’s a really different lit scene.

Mm hmm.

And I was wondering, sort of like vis-à-vis your recent experiences, because Slut Lullabies came out last spring...

Yeah, it came out in May.

So, sort of like that period of time you’ve been on the scene domestically -- I mean, how did you really... what did you make of Kenya, you know, coming on the heels of that?

Kenya’s got a very, very different lit scene. Just to sort of backtrack, I’d won the SLS [Summer Literary Seminars] fiction contest, and so I was in the fiction workshop, and Therese Svoboda was the instructor, and I know her from here, and so that was all awesome, but that’s like a few hours in the morning in a conference room in your hotel, and you can kind of do that anywhere. The really cool part, the part that they really bill, is this Kenya Between the Lines program where they’re taking you to meet directly Kenyan writers, Kenyan artists, Kenyan filmmakers, and talking about basically the emerging art scene in Kenya, and the thing that’s really... we all kind of know it, but it doesn’t seem real until you get there, but, like, it was only a handful of years ago that there was this big building in the city center where they used to torture all the journalists, you know? I mean, Kenya is not a place where free speech has really existed consistently or for very long. So, they have this terminology for writers in Kenya, they call them first generation, second generation, and third generation, having to do with colonialism, post-colonialism, and now emerging writers, twentysomething hip-hop poets and what have you.

Do they interact much?

The first really fascinating thing about the Kenyan literary scene is that absolutely everyone knows everyone else. If you’re some twenty-year-old slam poet, and you’re giving a reading, you have Ngugi [wa Thiong’o], who was a frontrunner for the Nobel Prize last year, in your audience. It’s very non-hierarchical, in the sense that there just aren’t different tiers. It’s a small community. There’s this guy Binyavanga Wainaina, and Binya is basically the highest profile writer I would say there under forty. He’s maybe thirty-eight, thirty-nine, a writer who everyone in the country who’s interested in literature knows, and he’s very successful. But to say an equivalent of that here, you know -- he’s just kind of everywhere. Like at every new writer’s reading, at every talk about Kenyan literature, like you go to the National Museum, and there he is in the café, writing. You meet these writers and the next thing you know, you see them everywhere. They all attend every single other event by any of them. And they’re just kind of everywhere. There’s no sense of, you know, like, oh, I’m too good, or I’m famous and you’re not, or I have books out and you don’t. So, so, that’s fascinating, step one.

Mmm hmm.

But the other thing that was really fascinating to me as a publisher [of Dzanc Books imprint OV Books] is that they don’t have much of a concept of really distribution in Kenya. I mean, you’ve got writers like Ngugi and, I assume, Binya, whose work obviously has been distributed worldwide... I mean, Ngugi has been writing for several decades and you go into Borders or Barnes and Noble, and there are his books, but, for the most part, you can have writers who in Kenya are viewed as pretty, like, canonical, viewed as like godmothers or godfathers of Kenyan literature, who everyone in the country is like, “Oh, there’s been no artist, no writer who ever passed through East Africa without going and having tea with this person,” but they’re only famous internally. One such example is a writer named Rebecca Njau, who, um -- she’s kind of old, I don’t want to guess her age, for fear of being offensive, but she’s, you know, an older woman, she’s actually Binyavanga’s aunt, and, um, she and her husband ran a colony, like for artists and such, and apparently there was a little free love aspect involved, and that was all interesting, but mainly, you know, they were an artistic hub, and everybody in East Africa who’s at all involved in the arts knows them. So she did a reading from her new book, and Binya introduced her, and it was fascinating, and afterward I went over, you know, thinking about things like The Nervous Breakdown and writing book reviews, and I went up to her and I was like, “So, who’s your publisher in the United States? I really want to get on your review list. I’d love to write about you in America.” And she’s like, “I don’t have a United States publisher. My books have never appeared in the United States.” And I was like, “Oh, well, who’s your UK publisher?” “Well, my book is -- one of my books is available -- as an ebook in England, but other than that, none of my books are in the UK,” and I’m just like, I’ve just spent an hour and a half listening to every writer in the entire Kenyan lit scene stand up and pay homage to this woman as a godmother of Kenyan literature... and she’s basically never been circulated outside of Kenya.

Sounds like she’d be perfect for Open Letter or, obviously, OV Books.

Well, you know, we did that anthology A Stranger Among Us, and in Stacy Bierlien the editor’s introduction, she was talking about how something like, I don’t know, eighty, ninety percent of literature in translation is literature in English being translated into other languages.

Hmm.

Like we export our English-language literature, but mostly we don’t...

It doesn’t work the other way around, yeah.

You know, we don’t import. Now, keeping in mind, of course, Kenyan literature is written in English. I mean, Swahili is the dominant spoken language, but written-wise...

So they are all writing in English.

English is the dominant language. There isn’t really even that excuse. It’s just inexplicable. And so right now I’m hoping, I’m hoping, that Other Voices Books may become the next, the publisher of Rebecca Njau in, in English. I basically was like, you know, “I want to see this novel when it’s done,” I would really love to try to introduce this, you know, this woman who’s been writing since colonial times, and who’s been known in Kenya for decades and decades, to an American audience. Apparently no one’s ever heard of her here. I mean, I Googled her, that seems to be true. Nobody, nobody knows who she is. So, so that’s a very long answer.

[Laughs]

But, yes, it’s quite different there.

It must have been such a, you know, such a moment of... of shock and surprise. I mean, just hearing this makes me start to reevaluate everything we do here. I mean, we’re so tied up in, you know, distribution.

We are! Yes.

And it seems like... What you describe reminds me of -- naïve is probably pejorative -- but that sense of, like, when you’re, I don’t even want to say in college, because then, by the time you’re get to college and you’re writing, it already becomes competitive. I don’t know, you know, those really young kids that are, like, “I’m just making art, I’m writing,” writing poems.

It reminded me, yes.

That lack of fear, and, you know, the lack of hang-ups.

There’s really a very celebratory aspect in Kenya right now, because people are being able to write more freely than they were in the past. And there’s also really a very on-going and very-pressing-to-them discussion of what does Kenyan literature mean right now. So, you know, there were Kenyan writers who were writing in the colonial tradition. Then there was a whole generation of writers who were writing in reaction against the colonial tradition. And now those issues are largely very passé to the new generation of Kenyan writers, and people are really grappling with, like, what does it mean to be a Kenyan writer, do we have a particular flavor, is there something we do differently or more uniquely, and you have to remember Kenya is smaller than Texas. We do a lot of talk in this country about, like, oh, you know, “Freedom [by Jonathan Franzen] is the new American novel,” or whatever is the new American novel, but there is no... it’s very difficult to say something is the American novel. It’s a damn big country. It’s easier to say, oh, it’s a Chicago novel.

The scope has to be reduced.

Yeah. And while Kenya is very diverse in terms of landscape, and, you know, one minute you’re in this lush green tea plantation, or you’re in Nairobi with three and a half million people, and the next minute you’re somewhere where they still ride donkeys down the street, and it’s a Muslim culture... it’s very... there are huge differences in terms of Kenya, really shocking differences, considering how small the country is. And there’s a small art scene. And people are really grappling with what is our identity in the literary world, and they’re not worried about, like, am I making enough money, did I get a big advance, is my agent more prestigious than your agent, you know, am I in all the Barnes and Nobles on the front table... like, no one is -- you know, I mean, I guess maybe we could say, theoretically, they’d like to have those problems. I guess eventually they will in fact have those problems as their literary tradition develops with more freedom and there starts to be more economic power behind it... but right now, all the concerns are creative. All the concerns are issues of community, identity, writing content... like no one, no one seems to be viewing it as, like, a means of economic or celebrity showoffedness. Like that doesn’t seem to be -- admittedly, I was there a month -- but that doesn’t seem to be the case. You know, I can’t really imagine attending an open mic poetry reading here in Chicago and there being, like, Nobel Prize contenders in the audience. That’s just not something... you know, that just doesn’t seem to be something that really exists here. So it was hard not to be... I mean, I was very drawn to that, even as I realized a great deal of political oppression and political turbulence and change have contributed to -- maybe -- these problems, that it’s not all a picnic or a rose garden, you know, the community is smaller or doesn’t have as sophisticated a distribution methodology or whatever, because of certain difficulties the community has had to struggle with... but yet it was sort of beautiful, because it’s like here everyone is snarky and self-promoting and worrying that they’re not making enough money, and it just seemed like their people were like, can I contribute to this scene? Can I contribute to this community?

Sure.

...Do I have something to say? And that was really cool.

And they’re listening to each other. And reading each other. How are they disseminating their ideas, besides readings and events? Do they have a lot of publications? Journals and things?

In Africa, in general, there is not very much of a literary magazine culture.

Uh huh.

There is a really prominent one in South Africa, and then there’s a really prominent one in Kenya called Kwani. And basically, yeah, everybody publishes in Kwani, like, I mean, really famous people, really new people. Everyone reads Kwani, and books are distributed by Kwani. Kwani also publishes books, or booklets, and so the relationship seems much more immediate. I mean, there is distribution within Kenya, definitely people are reading things, and kind of all reading many of the same things, and I’d like to know more, I don’t know precisely how the distribution works, I’m not sure. It didn’t seem to me that there is an outside “distributor,” it seemed to me as though that Kwani distributes its texts directly to bookstores. I may be wrong about that, I kind of aim to find out, but it was fascinating, because Kwani does not -- they have an online presence, and they have a website, but they don’t really have an international subscription system where you can subscribe to their written books that effectively, like on an international level.

Any plans to expand the readership?

They also talked about how they were planning to do ebooks, and they anticipated that it would take about two years, and so I guess here might be the downside to their being this small collective community. I immediately, as a publisher, started thinking logistically, like why would it take two years to make an ebook? And clearly it wouldn’t take two years to make an ebook. The only reason -- I think -- is that everything is done by committee, everything is done by “let’s meet, let’s talk about the pros and cons of having an ebook, let’s talk about how we would design the ebook, let’s have fifty different people weigh in on this.” Things are taking a long time because there still isn’t maybe a lot of diversification within the community and it’s still so collective that everything takes a million years. Like when you have an academic meeting in a department of a university and what would take two hours ends up taking two months because there’s thirty people involved, and blah, blah, blah, and you have to have a meeting every week to talk about something that you could have done in fifteen minutes...

Because they need to have meetings more than they need to actually solve problems.

Yes. Yes. And so I wondered, how much is that perhaps contributing to -- like, you know, “Really? You want an ebook? Like, all right, I’ll get my intern to make you an ebook next weekend.” You know? But I suspect that’s not how it works. I think it’s not as easy as “My intern could make you an ebook next weekend,” because obviously their intern could make them an ebook next weekend. There must be some sort of internal process that I’m not aware of.

Maybe they’re not in a rush. It sounds like things are working pretty well for them within this largely insular system.

It reminded me, in some ways, of things I used to read about the Bloomsbury Circle, you know, the Bloomsbury Group, with the Hogarth Press and everything, and kind of like the way everyone in that community knew each other and published each other. There are many communities like that within indie publishing here, but there’s not one or two, there are many. One of the big debates last year when everyone was making these best-of lists was, okay, you know, the New York Times comes out with a list, and everyone is pissed off at their list, so Dzanc, my parent company, comes out with an alternative indie press list, but even within indie press circles in the United States, people are like, “Yeah, well, that list is as clique-y as the New Yorker’s list, that’s the Dzanc clique.” What about, you know, the McSweeney’s clique? What about the Chiasmus clique? There are so many different groups doing -- they’re not doing the same thing, but they’re doing similar things, and they all have groups of friends, and they all have groups of supporters, and they all have groups of readers, and the circles overlap, but they’re not identical. It seems like when I was reading about the Bloomsbury group, like back when I was young in college, it seemed sort of like, if you stuck your finger in the center of that, you had your finger on the pulse of the thing. And I feel like that’s what’s going on in Kenya right now. Binyavanga and this group of people, this is the pulse of Kenyan literature. I don’t know if... I mean, I love the indie press scene here, but I don’t feel like...

It’s not central.

I don’t feel like there’s any such community here. Maybe indie publishing twenty years ago, there was more of that. But thankfully, it’s an asset and to our benefit, I think. It’s expanded so much now that even indie publishing is diverse in the US now.

Maybe it’s just that the US is too big. You know, even in a small indie sense, it’s just too big to have...

It’s a big issue of access too. I think people feel less local affinity, particularly here in a large city. Chicago readers or event attendees or whatever don’t necessarily feel compelled to limit themselves to a Chicago writer base. Why would they, in a sense? We have writers coming on tour here, we’ve got obviously chain bookstores where writers from not only across the country but the world are coming here. So if you are a writer in Chicago, you might have more incentive to think, “Oh, where’s the Chicago literary community, how can I be a part of it, I probably want to know these people,” but if you’re just a reader, and you happen to live in Chicago, you may not necessarily feel any particular affinity toward a Chicago literary community. You can read any book you want from anywhere.

I think of the alternative music scene in the nineties, and granted the following didn’t include every Chicagoan, but the interest was sizable, it’s something still talked about. That moment. I just read today -- heard today, I don’t read any news -- but there’s a new Urge Overkill album. And I was like, “I loved Urge Overkill.” And it made me think of Material Issue, which I randomly referenced the other day.

Oh, god, yes, yes!

You know the drummer [Mike Zelenko] made my bookcases.

I didn’t know that. That’s so cool.

Yeah, he also has a new band, The Ladies and Gentlemen.

Oh, god, my friend Didi used to be friends with those [Material Issue] guys and dragged me to their shows constantly. You know, I know like five thousand different people who used to date the same guy from Smashing Pumpkins.

[Laughs]

You’re right, that was the nineties, you know, I mean, that was a different...

There was a community. It had those people. Maybe because they were so unconcerned with commercial success -- which, I mean, they ended up getting.

Which they ended up getting.

But they weren’t so focused on it. I think that’s what enabled them to become... of course, it destroyed a lot of them. And made Liz Phair have to go do TV soundtracks, which she says in interviews she likes doing.

Oh, really?

But -- but -- a far cry from selling drawings on the corner of Milwaukee and Damen, which, as goes local lore, is how she got her start.

I definitely feel like Chicago -- maybe not the country in general, but Chicago -- has made a lot of progress in the last five to ten years, in terms of having a cultural, a city identity for the literary scene. However, I don’t think things like One Book, One Chicago [a heavily advertised and funded mostly ceremonial citywide reading initiative] is the pulse of Chicago literature. I think that is well-heeled people who legitimately like to read and want to be part of what they view as a literary or artistic community through city-run organizations or what have you. The real grassroots on-the-ground Chicago literary community has always been much more D.I.Y. It has no fuckin’ money. It never has. It’s very... I don’t want to say it’s blue-collar...

It’s grassroots.

I think it likes to act blue-collar. I think probably most of the people grew up in quite a different milieu than blue-collar.

Oh, well, yeah.

But, you know, it’s young, it doesn’t have a lot of money, and it’s based in bar readings and publications being put together by the press and distributed by their own hands. And they don’t have [the distributor] Consortium, and it certainly doesn’t have One Book, One Chicago status. I think that’s a very different community, a community more about affluence and middle-age or whatever, than the community that’s really making things happen in Chicago, whether it’s something like [indie press] Featherproof or [writer and impresario] Amy Güth, or reading series like RUI or Second Story, which...

Did you ever do that?

I did Second Story, I have a funny story about that, but Second Story is not even written-word based, it’s oral storytelling...

I was going to say. It’s more like acting.

It’s like a theater group, which Chicago has a great tradition of. Those guys pack the house, and they actually make money, but they’re not going to be endorsed by One Book, One Chicago anytime soon. It’s a completely different community.

Do you think that’s a specific issue we’re having here, or...

I think that exists to some extent in all cities. Obviously what the big New York publishing industry views as their poster children are not the same people running the reading series. Again, kind of as a contrast to Kenya, there’s clear hierarchy here. But I think Chicago’s always been a city where the upper level of the hierarchy is a little bit more... it’s not what the vast majority of the people are connected to. As opposed to in New York, where there’s a whole publishing industry that really is more connected to the more celebrity or monetized successful writers. Here in Chicago, it really is more on the grassroots, on the street level.

If there’s any evidence of that, you see few actual Chicago writers featured at those big Cultural Center events.

Yes, yes, yes. I don’t know if she still feels this way, but you have a writer like, say, Audrey Niffenegger, who’s very successful, who, when I published her in Other Voices [magazine]... this was like in 2007, so her second book hadn’t come out yet, but The Time Traveler’s Wife was already a big bestseller, was basically saying, I don’t feel like I know that many people in the Chicago literary community. And certainly libraries and big bookstores were taking notice of her, but a lot of the other people on the ground didn’t know her yet. Now she teaches at Columbia [College] and she’s done other things, and I think she’s probably gotten a lot more integrated. You can be kind of an internationally wealthy and famous writer here and not be connected to the local scene, if mainly you’re reading at the Harold Washington Library. It’s not really where the other writers are going.

It’s an interesting city. But so, there’s another city coming up. That’s a terrible segue.

[Laughs]

But whatever, I want to talk about London Calling, which is a book you first told me about before I’d been to London. Right before I went, so it was a couple of years ago. And what I think is interesting about it, beyond the story of its particular trajectory -- it’s gotten stalled and rerouted and derailed on the way to publication -- is that I think it kind of represents your process almost. This book will be your third, but is really something I know you wrote before My Sister’s Continent.

Um hmm. It was my first novel.

So what’s interesting to me about your process is that you’re the opposite of a quick-turnaround blogger. You’re not just factory-producing, in the New York mode, draft in six months, a year and a half later, it’s a book. I can’t write like that. I can’t be happy with something until the ninetieth draft, and I know you’re similar.

I certainly don’t write like that, not only because I think it’s strange to write like that, which I do, but I have too many other things going on. I mean, obviously I have three children. I edit not just OV Books but the Nervous Breakdown fiction section. I teach at two different universities. I can’t be on a six-month book deadline, blah, blah, blah. I guess -- theoretically -- if I were a big corporate-publisher author, who was getting $350,000 advances, presumably my editor would have pressed me to quit some of those things, and would be throwing money at me, saying get it done by this date or you don’t get this money, and maybe that becomes people’s incentive, sure, why wouldn’t it, but...

But would you even want... Say you could. You wouldn’t want to, I don’t think.

I would not want to be a book factory.

That’s not your style.

I’m not really capable of it. I don’t think I’d work that way. And I also don’t think, ultimately, on the one hand... Certainly I look at writers who are able to sort of quit all their day jobs and really make a living as a writer, and say, “Wow, that’s fabulous, we’d all like to be so lucky,” but I’m not really willing to give up a lot of the other things. I want to go to Kenya for a month and not write anything while I’m there. I want to pick up my kids at two-thirty instead of having a nanny do it, and not necessarily be writing while they’re home and I’m helping them with their homework.

Get interviewed over brunch with whiskey and margaritas and a sound guy.

Right. I want to promote and produce other writers’ work through Nervous Breakdown, through OV Books, previously Other Voices magazine. I’m not willing to give up all the things that it would take to make writing a full-time job. I don’t think that means that I love writing less. I think, for me, it’s because I love writing so much I want it to be what it is.

Yeah.

When I’m in a groove, I may write for fifteen, sixteen hours a day, and have a really hard time doing anything else, and blow a lot of things off and miss other deadlines, but when I’m not in that space, I’m not going to sit down in front of the computer and basically tell myself, “You’re producing three thousand words today.” I don’t have that kind of... it’s not a job. It’s not a job. It’s a passion. And I feel really lucky that I have other ways, other forms of work, a spouse with a job and what have you, that it doesn’t have to be a “job.” I get to do what I love. Anyway, that said, London Calling was supposed to come out quite a while ago, so it was not necessarily my choice that it didn’t, that it’s taking the longest route to publication practically in the history of the world. It was supposed to come out in 2008 with [defunct] Impetus Press, and as Chicago already knows, because it was written about quite extensively in the city, Impetus went bankrupt and the book disappeared off the horizon for a while. Now my current editor [Bryan Tomasovich] at Emergency Press has been after me to see and to publish that book for a while. At first I had a contract with a marketing group that was going to be handling it, and I had to sort of get out from under a few different loopholes before I was able to really show them the book and pursue that, but, yeah, he does want to come out with it in 2012.

Have you edited it significantly?

I actually just showed it to my writing group, and it’s a testimony to what an old a book it is that they had actually never seen it, even though I’d been with them for something like four years. They just read it and gave me some suggestions, and I am going to do another little revision of it. It’s not going to be huge and extensive, I think, for two reasons. Number one, I already revised it a lot when Impetus was going to publish it. It was at that point already a very old book. I wrote it in something like 1997, and they were looking at it in 2006. I did a big revision that took like six months of intensive work. So there’s that. But the other thing is, I don’t think I want to try to turn the book into something I would have written now. I think that’s not what the book is going to be, and that if I were to try that, it would only ruin what’s good about it and what, you know, its own charm, its own nature is. It’s a book I wrote before I was even thirty years old, and I wrote it at a very different time -- I was spending a lot of time in Europe and in London -- and it would be really, really, really different if I wrote it now. That’s not what I think that book wants to be. If I want to write a new book, I’ll write a new book. It’s not going to be, you know, London Calling: Fifteen Years Later.

[Laughs] Yeah.

I want it to stand on its own.

That seems to be the danger, of any revision, when you take it on. You’re applying who you are at that point to older work that may or may not have wanted the newer you.

When I did the revision in 2006 or 2007 for Impetus, a great deal of my agenda had to do with clarity. It has kind of an adventure plot, it’s a bit of a thriller, which anyone who’s ever read anything of mine knows is very different from my current work. I didn’t want it to be confusing or muddled or contradictory or unclear. A lot of my revising was aimed at making sure things were coherent and the plot actually was consistent. There was also a particular character whom I didn’t think was developed enough in the first version, and I spent a lot of time on that increased development. But I didn’t try to give it anything resembling a worldview I have now, or what I think a book should do now. I just want it to be what it was, and what it is, and I’m not sure that the audience for it is completely identical to the first two books that I’ve come out with, which were written later. But I will tell you that my writing group thinks it’s a lot more similar than I thought it was. So it’s interesting that maybe you don’t change as much as you think you do. It’s more plot-centered, but I guess a lot of the psychology is really quite similar.

It sounds like neither Impetus nor Emergency have tried to apply too heavy a hand to it. Or else you’d end up with two completely different novels. Just knowing who was editing at Impetus.

Right. [Laughs]

The whole concept of Impetus Press was something I think quite different than Emergency Press.

Yes, yes. Impetus was looking particularly for work that was smart, that was literary, but that had a very clear pop sensibility. This book takes place in 1989, in the squatter subculture of London. It’s a very retro book now -- now. I mean, it wasn’t that retro when I was writing it. It has a lot to do with the cultural climate of that time. It’s not a book that could be written about London right now. That London doesn’t exist anymore. It’s a different era. I think Impetus was drawn to that, it was drawn to the strong plot of the book, because they were interested in that hybrid genre, that straddling-the-line between sort of like a popular mainstream book versus a literary book. They were looking for work that had the prose or the characterization of a literary novel but that was really a page-turner. It was definitely right up their alley in that regard. Emergency has no such agenda. Bryan really just publishes work he likes. He has a taste for edgy work, but I don’t think that he has any particular mission that’s as clear or as specific, that has such clear parameters as the way Impetus did.

They’ve done some poetry, too, right?

They’ve done a lot of poetry, which was what they started out doing. They have a different editor for poetry than they do for the prose work. This guy Scott Zeiger, who lives in New York, does the poetry books, and Bryan does the fiction and nonfiction out of Seattle.

It doesn’t sound like... I get the sense your manuscripts are pretty much ready to go, as soon as the editors accept them. So, what is the time spent on after the contracts are signed? You strategize marketing, or...

A book’s production period -- obviously, I’m involved in this more often on the editing end than I am as a writer. This will be my third book, but as an editor I’ve come out with something like ten. Timing is really crucial. First of all, indie press books kind of... you don’t want to put one out in September, for example, because there’s a new book by Francine Prose and by Margaret Atwood and blah blah. September is heavy-hitter season. Although actually Francine Prose’s new book is coming out in April. To some extent, you’re thinking, when can I get the most review coverage for my authors’ books, as an indie press, but also your creative edits -- you’ve got a copy editor who’s probably not getting paid as much as the copy editors in New York and has three other jobs, on top of your job, and so might need a little more time than the Random House copy editors do. Your publicity team is basically yourself and a couple of interns, who, again, don’t get paid, so things take longer in the indie world. You don’t want to rush a book out the door. I will say that a lot of indies rush books out the door. They are more concerned -- for noble reasons -- with publishing as many good books as they can, within the time and budget that they have, but that’s not our mission at Other Voices. We really are aimed at trying to support the entire life of a book, and that means that we’re not just taking every single bit of money and putting it into printing costs. We pay a copy editor, we do a lot of creative edits that take a lot of time, we do a book tour that we arrange for the writer and we partially fund. We basically do a hell of a lot of media copies, sending out galleys. I mean, a lot of indie presses send out twenty books. We may send out two hundred books. We really try to give it everything we can, and that takes time and money too. How a book season works, like when you put out a book and how long it takes to produce the book, has a lot to do with that. It also has to do with how ready is the book to go, obviously. You’re working with someone like, say, Tod Goldberg [author of OV Press story collections Simplify and, most recently, Other Resort Cities], and probably every story in the book has already been published in a magazine, because he’s a very prolific working writer. If you’re me, you still make him jump through hoops, because you have your own definite ideas, but it’s not going to take a year and a half.

Sure.

Other writers are coming to you with a raw manuscript that you see something in, and you’re walking them through three, four complete revisions of that book before it comes out. And then anthologies take forever. Even if you’re publishing work that has predominately been published before, it takes about two years to build a good anthology, because there are just so many people involved.

I think mine [The Art of Friction] was about three and a half years, from proposal pitching to publication date.

Bryan taking on London Calling... I wouldn’t say it’s ready to roll, but it’s not going to be a lot, because the book has been through a lot of lives before him.

Well, it’s exciting.

It is, it is. [Laughs] It’s crazy. It’s like some young form of myself still allowed to come alive and live in the world. I’m looking forward to it.

Most readers won’t know it’s had that kind of a life prior to publication, and I think will give you extra points for verisimilitude, and really capturing the era.

When I first wrote the novel, it didn’t have as interesting an epoch as it did later on. I tried, really briefly -- very briefly, compared to My Sister’s Continent, which made the rounds forever before it finally came out -- but I tried briefly to get it published when I first finished it. One editor who really took a lot of interest in the book ended up saying, “This novel is set too long ago in London to be contemporary, but not far away enough to be retro.” I’m laughing to myself. All right, honey, it’s retro now.

Maybe it’s a cliché question, but I’ve always liked that you’re prolific in both long and short form prose. Do things start as a short story and go on? Or the reverse? I know an early version of My Sister’s Continent became all stories.

Yes, yeah. I had a whole series of stories called “Body Parts,” and quite a few are now serialized on the Necessary Fiction blog, and they all got published on their own. Generally speaking, my novels are not usually something that I thought was one short story and it just grew and grew out of control. I really do think about novels and short stories quite differently. Even My Sister’s Continent -- it was never supposed to be one short story. I was going to do this series, and I did do it, and then I became interested more in the back story, I started thinking about the Freudian parallels, and I started pursuing it. It takes place in an earlier timeframe than the “Body Parts” stories did, so it wasn’t so much of a retelling of them as kind of a going back and deciding the real core story was earlier. My short stories tend to be long. They’re usually about thirty pages; they’re not short. Nowadays, when everything’s supposed to be under three thousand words -- I’ve never written a story that short in my entire life.

[Laughs] It’s hard to even get into something in under two thousand words.

Oh, it’s crazy. I have immense admiration for people who can write just a really complex story in so little space. It’s not how my mind works. I’ve probably written some fifteen, twenty page stories, and sometimes it makes me want to write about a character again at another time, but I haven’t really had the experience of writing a story and it turning into a novel. The current novel that I’m writing has a little bit more of a novel-in-stories frame. The stories are not so self-contained, but they are enough so that a number of them have come out on their own, in magazines. They’re also long as hell, so I’m also surprised and thrilled that anybody would publish them as they are. Sometimes I think episodically, in terms of, like, a compilation of stories makes a novel, but usually I have parameters in my head.

Like set?

They change.

When you begin? Or...

People don’t always do what you think they’re going to do. Certainly they don’t sound on paper like they sounded in your head. Things change in that sense. I recently wrote a piece, my newest short story, which is going to be in Fifth Wednesday. Basically it’s like a triptych piece between a mother, her own alcoholic mother, and her son, all spanning this one day, where the alcoholic mother is dying in the hospital, and the mother is meeting her lover, and the little boy is kind of wrestling with a dilemma in his head about wanting to wear his mother’s sort of fancy pink shirt as a dress, and how he can get his mother to let him wear it. So the parameters of this day were where the story was going to go, and all the characters did things and said things that I certainly hadn’t plotted out beforehand, but the parameters stayed in place, it was a piece that took place over one day. It ended up, as everything I do, a little longer than I thought it was going to be, but it wasn’t in danger of turning into a novel. When I’m thinking novel...

You’re really are in that mindset.

I’m really in. You know, it’s going to be five hundred and fifty pages by the time I’m done with the first draft, and my job for the next two or three years is to really reign the fucker in.