Looking for some good news?

The storm coverage is still swirling, NYC underwater, the Jersey Shore in tatters. Election coverage is an incessant background noise in everything from comedy sitcoms to twitter.

So I know we are all looking for some good news, some hope. And then, I don’t know, Disney goes and buys Lucasfilm and announces yet another (inevitably terrible) Star Wars movies? Penguin and Random House are merging. The world, for writers, is looking a little grim. But when has it ever been otherwise? (Yes, I’m also writing this post after a brutal dentist visit – three fillings today with no Novocaine, so perhaps I’m looking for a little cheering up.)

I want to call your attention to a couple of articles I thought were worth reading. One was about the proposition of value that publishers bring to authors. My little brother asked me recently, what is the purpose of finding a publisher for your poetry books instead of just publishing them yourself? In the old days, I would have had a much clearer answer – something about publishers offering authors marketing, financial support, distribution into bookstores, legitimacy, even. Now, in this new era, still emerging with its e-books and Amazon dominancy and ever-shrinking-and-hard-to-find-poetry-audiences, I’m not so sure of the answer. So, do publishers need to offer more value to authors?

Poets are generally so grateful to have a publisher that they will waive almost everything – marketing expectations (even modest ones, say, an ad in Poets & Writers or even on a web site somewhere,) promised prize monies, royalties, say to where and how their work appears – in order to be published, to be “legitimate”. Is the author’s only other option to go rogue, self publish, and push their wares at readings and on twitter? As a reviewer, I’ve often found that small presses’ books are inevitably more interesting and better written than either large press or self-published work. I am a fan of the small, struggling press with one or two people trying to make it work; they have the courage to have a point of view, an integrity of taste, that even when it isn’t your taste, you have to respect.

And onto reviewing – many years ago a female poet told me that I have a duty to review, that there are not enough women reviewing books, and not enough books by women being reviewed. I did start reviewing because I felt it was something I owed the poetry community, to find interesting books and talk about them in a way that might make a reader, you know, want to read poetry. In particular, I wanted to find poetry that other people weren’t already celebrating, poetry that deserved celebration.
Here’s a link to Margaret Atwood writing in 1976 – when I was three years old – about being a woman writer, and about the problem of reviewing in particular.
http://thisrecording.com/today/2010/8/29/in-which-we-change-diapers-and-collect-china.html
The same sexual put-downs, the old sexist stereotypes – is she an “Emily” or a “Sylvia?” – are still sadly pretty freaking wide-spread. Read VIDA’s count to find out if the numbers have changed, because, for the most part, they haven’t.

Did I promise you good news at the beginning of this post? Somewhere floating around the internets this morning was a picture of a big rainbow over NYC, a reminder of the Biblical flood and its inexplicably happy rainbow ending:

(Source: http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/science/rainbow_real.jpg)
If we believe the rainbow, things will get better for us. We will keep writing, even if we’re unsure of our audiences, how to reach them effectively, even how to communicate with our fellow human beings. We will keep creating because it is in us to create, to paint the rainbow even if it is absent in the story, because we all want to believe in happy endings.