Giant Steps Press Is Looking for a Few Good Manuscripts

KIRPAL GORDON: I'm pleased to announce that Giant Steps Press is looking for fiction, non-fiction and poetry manuscripts. Please reference the SUBMISSION GUIDELINES at the very end of this blog entry for specifics, but in terms of who we are, let me say up front that we formed three years ago, an attempt by working writers to collectivize in the face of major changes in the lit industry. We've now assembled a team as talented as any I’ve had with the most technologically up-to-date and inspired indie publisher. I don't just mean printing; I mean the whole enchilada:

---book and cover design in PDF for Amazon CreateSpace upload/interface;

---Kindle upload/interface;

---Smashwords upload/interface (mobi, rtf, pdf, lrf, pdb, txt);

---ePub upload/interface (Apple iStore-compliance and Apple iPad/iBooks, Nook, Sony Reader, Kobo, and most e-reading apps including Stanza, Aldiko, Adobe Digital Editions);

---copy editing;

---proofreading;

---publicity;

---press kit;

---book launch press release (Scribd);

---GSP blog announcement and interview;

---book reviews;

---promotional video, audio and YouTube;

---literary event production, including catering and marketing.

We supply through one team everything that a writer could need, but each writer decides which of these services are relevant and worthwhile. We are not publishers in the traditional sense of the word; we're in business to offer writers help in developing their audience and publishing their next book. You tell us your expectations for your manuscript---print and ebook sales, reviews, shows, etc.---and we recommend paths to meet and exceed those expectations. Moreover, in contrast to the old writer-publisher model in which the former “is chosen and done to” by the latter, GSP is for writers seeking to become more responsible in the production-distribution of their own work and pro-active in collectivizing with other like-minded writers and collaborators.

Because bookmaking has shifted from decisions made by big conglomerates to individual writers choosing from a wide range of smaller and more numerous fulfillment-of-services model for paperback and eBooks, the real enemy as I see it is a lack of knowledge regarding options, whether from a publishing house, vanity press, POD service, agent, editor, publicist or marketing and promo outfit. Hey, it's the wild West out there. Some friends and literary associates, as well as clients I ghostwrite for, have been hustled by exploiters who over-promise and under-deliver, so it is a personal pleasure to offer prospective authors our complete list of services.

John, you came to book writing after thirty years of playing rock and roll. Would you pick it up from here with your story?

JOHN RULLO: As a songwriter/musician, I witnessed what I knew of the music business collapse right before my eyes. Slowly but surely the idea of getting “a record deal” faded into oblivion. Technology has made it possible for anyone to produce music at home and make it accessible to the world via the Internet. When I wrote my first book, Blind Spots, I had high hopes of getting a “publishing deal” but soon learned what had happened to the music industry had also taken a toll on the literary world...mom and pop book stores were rapidly becoming a thing of the past. It seemed that unless someone was a well-known celebrity, famous or infamous, chances of having a New York Times best-seller were less than zero. A friend in the business suggested I self-publish and recommended a publishing company whose name I won’t reveal. The finished product of Blind Spots was professionally done, beautifully formatted with an outstanding eye-catching cover. The only problem: unless I had endless dollars and time to invest in promotion, nobody would be aware of my work except for friends, relatives and my Facebook world. Without the resources to copy edit, proofread, format and design, vanity publishers could cost an unsuspecting author thousands while never making him/her a profit. In most cases, the publishing houses are raking in the big bucks by charging writers for an endless menu of services dangling the carrot of big royalties!

 

A good friend of mine just got suckered into dumping over three thousand dollars to a publisher just for making his 40-page short story into an Amazon-available e-book! Would-be authors need to be made aware of the money pit they could easily fall into when signing on the dotted line with most of the “Publishers” out there who are so willing to have their clients’ credit cards on file! More times than not, there is no human face or voice to answer their questions; all correspondence is done on-line and in rare instances by the telephone representative who in most cases only encourage writers to buy more of their services. Since collaborating with you and the formation of Giant Steps Press, I have since published two more books at a fraction of the cost of leaving a manuscript in the hands of the faceless publishers. I know that we can help writers avoid the mistakes I have made, steer them in the right direction and offer honest and necessary services while saving them hundreds of dollars.

Norm, as our new technologies director and member of our acquisitions team, how would you characterize the current state that writers face today?

 

NORMAN BALL: The whole game today is about control and self-promotion. Let's face it, the industry is flattening. With Amazon's 2011 foray into publishing its own roster of authors, literary agents and traditional publishers are quaking in their boots all over again. These traditional publishing routes will only slow further, especially for lesser-known authors, given the fresh uncertainties. The time is right though for collaborative initiatives, skill-sharing and creative-collectives. I think GSP is the right vehicle at the right time.

 

 

KIRPAL GORDON: You’ve taken two GSP titles beyond the Amazon CreateSpace print-on-demand and Kindle sites. What's it been like formatting ebooks in this new era?

 

 

NORMAN BALL: It's important for people to realize that GSP is really a portal and not a press at all. We provide a proven and travelled path into the various ebook and print platforms, and boy do you need an experienced Sherpa guide! You only need to spend a short time up on the Kindle and Createspace discussion forums to realize that we're very much in the realm of an inexact science. People are going crazy up there trying to get their books just right.

 

JOHN RULLO: I wasted a colossal amount of time formatting my second book in Kindle. I thought I could do it myself just like I had done my first book, but the number of mistakes just kept multiplying and customer service became an instant oxymoron!  Is Amazon's Kindle going the way of all monopolies?

NORMAN BALL: Hah! That's a whole 'nother debate, John. Amazon is the Walmart of everything Walmart isn't the Walmart of. One morning we'll awaken to discover Amazon has taken over the executive branch of government. They just scarfed up the Washington Post the other day. Within a GSP context though, it really doesn't matter who the behemoth du jour happens to be. GSP is an agnostic portal. No matter the letterhead, we'll tunnel ourselves in and we're bringing your book with us (gestures theatrically to the blog-reading audience).

But back though to the administrative realities of day-to-day book production, the problem with Createspace/Kindle is, as I see it, an existential one. There is no right way to do it. People adhere to an identical procedure only to achieve different results. The vagaries are huge. Exceptions are the rule. I'll cite but a few: appropriate bleeds on book covers, manipulating and arranging images, migrating MS Word mss over to HTM format and using Word in a preemptively smart way as it wasn't really designed to be a desktop publisher or provider of print-ready materials. The list goes on and on. So beyond guiding the book to the summit, GSP helps load the horse with the appropriate provisions before the trip is even undertaken.

Let me remind you also that when you're creating an eBook, you're shooting at as many as nine different platforms, each with it own optimal aesthetic i.e. the proverbial moving target. You have the family of Kindle products, the Nook, the iPad, the iPhone, etc. So you're trying to strike a balance between all these competing appliances. Finally, the reader fulfills part of the aesthetic experience by selecting his own background, font types and sizes etc. on the appliance itself. I cannot stress enough the fluidic nature of the eBook vis a vis the traditional 'static' presentation of the physical book. People need to be navigated through this morass. Buyer beware: One size does not fit all.

KIRPAL GORDON: Justin Luke, as marketing advisor to GSP, you have been most valuable in articulating the changes in the industry and for good reason. In terms of author-driven marketing and promotion that Norm mentioned, you scored the hugest possible hit with your first novel, Gulliver Travels, breaking the bank at Amazon, of all places, by the way, which led to a three book deal with ePublishing, print publishing, brick and mortar bookstore distribution and full PR marketing blitz. It’s this mastery of the new marketing technologies meeting the mastery of your material that gives us older fools hope in the aftermath of an industry destroyed by greed. In other words, you don’t need to be a midlist author waiting for someone to give you the big break. All that's over.

 

JUSTIN LUKE: Well, you fine fellas have many decades of collective writing experience, and I'm this young whippersnapper nerd upstart who sorta came out of nowhere. Giant Steps is doing just what its name cautions: taking some mighty big steps. You aren't just offering some bottled or boxed services--your coupling your artistic integrity and creativity to give future customers something better: professional services with an artistic heart. I'd use the term "consultancy" but it's so rigid and corporate-sounding. When our powers combine, we will offer dreamer-artists a strong shot in the arm and a realization of all they can do without the help of some big box publisher.

JOHN RULLO: As a founding member and the one with the most experience in the writing game, how do these changes play out for you, Kirpal? 

 

KIRPAL GORDON: We just launched New York at Twilight, my second title with GSP, which, thanks to this new team, looks and reads just right. The process went even more smoothly than with my first GSP title, Round Earth, Open Sky. 

As for experience, after finishing my post-grad degree, I worked in publishing as a copy writer, copy editor and proofreader; taught college writing; gave classes behind bars in GED language arts and produced a bi-monthly prison newsmagazine and an annual literay arts journal. I  also review literature and music; teach creative writing workshops; lead a spoken word/jazz band; do freelance journalism; interview artists and art activists; and over the last twenty years I've been a ghostwriter, editor, coach and literary consultant for a range of clients on over forty books and 250 articles.  

I've been involved in the indie press as a fiction, music and poetry editor. As an author of over twenty titles of my own original work, I've enjoyed great relationships with excellent presses that proved strong on literary merit but weak on marketing. They've all but disappeared in these changing times, thanks to increased fees from distributors, printers, storage rentals and the evaporation of the local book store.

So I'm glad to be helping writers find their own way into print and beyond, even more so now that I'm with this can-do, soup-to-nuts team. These new technologies confound me, but collectivizing with people whose skills exceed mine has changed my outlook considerably.

JOHN RULLO: Norm, you spoke briefly about the industry today as well as the advantages of going the GSP route. What do you think the future holds?

 

NORMAN BALL: As you touched upon, J, books are now where music was maybe ten years ago i.e. in a state of creative turmoil, except the creative part only became evident in the music world very slowly. For a long time it was just turmoil. Publishers should take some heart from that. While the bookcase may be leaning, the sky is not falling. For example, you may recall the RIAA throwing single moms in jail when their kids pirated tunes on Napster? I think these periodic business model eruptions create identity crises that ultimately lead industries to better self-awareness. Music got to know itself better and learned just how much of a social phenomenon it really is. Today, the performance venue is a potent source of sales. People buy stuff, CDs and T-shirts, at the back of the hall fresh from the buzz of a live performance. You have a pumped-up captive audience. Music is an encounter more than a shrink-wrapped product. There’s the souvenir effect too, where the energy of the encounter can feed into the product which becomes a relic or a keepsake of the event. Book fairs are a poor uncle by comparison. Quite simply, they don’t immerse anyone in the reference product. Yes, readings are okay. But books are not natural performers. Music is also an ambulatory pleasure that does not require your undivided attention. It’s portable. Reading is more demanding of your time and your posture. It’s hard to jog while reading.

 

KIRPAL GORDON: While music has both a private (solo listening) audience and a public one (live shows), don't books offer a solitary communion between reader and text?

NORMAN BALL: There’s a powerful Gutenberg bond, the tactile relationship to paper that Sven Birkerts really nails in his 1995 book The Gutenberg Elegies. Sure, there are a lot of social experiments underway around the periphery of this bond: opinion-sharing on goodreads.com, online Amazon reviews, enhanced ebooks, and the like. But as Birkerts pointed out, the relationship between author and reader is very much a ‘univocal’ one. We're speaking here of that little dictator, the omniscient narrator who, when he's in really good form, won’t let you put the book down.

So the book offers an intimate, quasi-spiritual relationship, not an immediately exterior or social one. The Wall Street Journal ran an article in January 2012 about the disappointing sales to date of many costly enhanced eBooks. Less may be more with books. You see, we’re in the tricky realm of the immersive versus the distractive—when does the distractive add up to the subtractive in book reading? It’s a testament to just how powerful the personal, reading experience is that the interactive bells and whistles have struggled to find traction.

 

KIRPAL GORDON: Give it time. Right now it’s a boutique service providing new opportunities for books with a niche market. Rather than threaten books and their unique entrancement, enhanced ebooks offer the drama of cinema and the enchantment of the oral tradition (spoken word) which has been around a lot longer than books. Instead of overstimulation, ebooks may end up offering hybrid media thrills for folks without the attention span that books require. 

 

NORMAN BALL: Well, I agree. You could see a hybridization of the book-reading experience and yes the affinity for physical books is in some part a generational phenomenon. Yet I think we'll find pulp to be a stubborn medium nonetheless, at least for some material segment of the reading public, and for a long time to come.

Digital goodies can feel like an obtrusive third-party in the reading experience. Too many hot links diffuse the encounter. eBooks should only very selectively point away from themselves. So yes, books have a lineage not easily overtaken. The industry is realizing that it was trying to foist, via enhanced ebooks, wannabe software apps in disguise. You can almost hear the outcry. God, not another app! People already have tons of software apps. When they buy a book, they’re buying a version of solitude. The ‘enhancements’ (hired actors reading passages, video evocations of certain key scenes, etc.) create a hypertextual ‘poly-vocal’ experience, to borrow again from Birkerts. Think Windows multitasking, except with binding and glue. People already have Facebook with all its prying fingers and obsequious detours. Maybe they want to unplug, curl up in the corner and engage one voice with a demonstrated knack for spinning a good yarn! Storytellers will never go extinct. So far, enhanced ebooks have been an application in search of a market. That’s rarely a good thing. Sales have been tepid.

KIRPAL GORDON: According to James Surowiecki's "E-Book Vs. P-Book," The New Yorker (July 29, 13), "In a recent survey by the Codex Group 97% of people who read e-books said that they were still wedded to print, and only 3% of frequent book buyers read only digital." However, I think any author must be aware of the potential of an electronic book, which is cheaper to make, cheaper to mail and cheaper to market. I think this is one of the best reasons for joining GSP---we're ahead of the curve with Norm now on board. As a poet-technologist-essayist-MBA-degreed insider, you stay informed on the subject in order to provide smart ways of navigating this new, ever-changing terrioty.

 

JOHN RULLO: I’m getting the sense we’ll have to make this a monthly discussion.

 

 

 

NORMAN BALL: Absolutely. Let me try to close this month’s loop by suggesting the death of the physical book, even more so than the CD, has been grossly exaggerated and will continue to be grossly exaggerated by industry watchers. Remember, the music industry analogy works only here and there for books. In 2011, digital music sales barely edged out physical sales at 50.3% (as reported by Neilsen Soundscan and Billboard). Given the hue and cry you’d be excused for thinking physical sales have vanished. They’re still half. Nevertheless, the book business is an industry in upheaval and will continue to change in the immediate and the long term.

 

JOHN RULLO: As the book industry changes, so are the up-to-the-minute options we offer writers. As a portal/collective on the look-out for how to best serve writers, not an old fashioned publishing house building a 21st century Bloomsbury group, any prose manuscript, fiction or nonfiction, qualifies for our attention. I know that some folks see us as publishers of the sci-fi genre with twisted visitations from the supernatural, but we want to suggest a bigger universe than that. In terms of content, length, genre---the sky's the limit.

KIRPAL GORDON: I think writers deserve to have their material read and responded to by literate and experienced people who aren't trying to take them to the cleaners. Hence to my way of thinking, good faith is best expressed by not charging a reading fee. If we can help writers achieve their stated goals, whether their books become a Giant Steps Press title or appear through another agency or portal, we will be serving a community that presently has no home.

 

NORMAN BALL: Writing is anything but a commodity. So it's hard to offer a commoditized price list. What we do is evaluate a manuscript and then offer a level of effort estimate that may include any partcular segment or a bundle of segments/services across the entire process. Our attention can begin near the very formative stages, say in the re-conceptualizing of a thesis or narrative through copy editing and proofreading to typsesetting, book cover design, Createspace interface, eBook formatting and finalizing. In the post-production phase, our services extend to product placement, writing press kits, offering audio-video support, doing interviews and reviews, marketing, promotion and creating readings and other events.

There's also the case of the busy executive who lacks the time or the writing skills to author his own book but nonetheless wants a book to get his ideas out into the marketplace. These projects can start pre-concept where ideas are coaxed and developed through interviews and discussions on the way to ghostwriting a book virtually from scratch as I completed recently, for example, with a home improvement book (see above).

 

KIRPAL GORDON: Regarding the busy executive as well as the industry leader, the entrepreneur re-making our world and the service provider in the trenches who sees a better way to do things, what these people have in common is the need to expose their new and better idea to their niche market. In today's business world, a book that does this acts like a business card used to, that is, it defines who you are, etches your value into the minds of your prospects and puts your product or service on the map. When your book proves helpful or valuable to readers in your market, you have the best chance of developing a lifetime customer.

This is also true for fiction writers, whether they write in definable genre categories or not. Our approach is more about helping you build a brand than expecting your book to be a one-hit wonder. So to the question of how much your manuscript-into-book will cost, the best answer is that it's on you. Every book needs the same things: a cover, contents, a press release, a bio of the author, favorable exposure to your market and a plan to sell copies. What distinguishes us from others is that we custom tailor our service to each writer from a menu of many options. We advise you on your options, but you decide the path you want to take.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES:

Giant Steps Press is seeking manuscripts of creative nonfiction, essays, short stories, novels and poetry.

First reading period begins September 15, 2013; ends, December 15, 2013.

Please submit your MS as an email attachment (in DOC, DOCX or PDF), Courier 12pt, double-spaced, Chicago Manual of Style. Please include as well a brief cover letter outlining your background, prior writing credits, specific intents with the MS, snail mail address and phone number.

GSP is a service provider. We do NOT charge a reading fee. We will get back to you with a brief written appraisal of our interest in your work within ninety (90) days.

No snail-mail please.

Send to: giantstepspress@gmail.com

 

 

 

Norman Ball Resolves Television in Six Easy Payments: Here's Installment One with Kirpal Gordon

(press release)
 

KIRPAL GORDON: First of all, Norm, welcome to Giant Steps Press as author of our latest title, Between River and Rock: How I Resolved Television in Six Easy Payments available on Amazon, Kindle and in just about every other e-format.

 

 

NORMAN BALL: Thanks, KP. It’s great to be aboard the good ship GSP.

 

KG: Reading your book-length essay on TV, technocracy and the internet was like revisiting the birth of Giant Steps Press. We formed because we’re after work like BR&R, books that cause readers to question the status quo via humor, candor and, for lack of a better phrase, “raids on the Unspeakable” (Thomas Merton) or visitations from the supernatural. I also love your illustrations, many of which appear here. They are an irreverent mixture of high and low culture, like the book itself.
 

NB: To me it's all sort of the same--high, low, tech, po. In fact, I'd love it if this book helped lateralize the debate and collapse divides, all in pursuit of a less-fractured union. I'm glad you said ‘supernatural’ first. I was no great Ginsberg aficionado prior to the writing of this book. Yet he suddenly appeared all over it like an unbidden insurgency. I came away utterly convinced that the ‘Whitman of his generation’ appellation is well-earned. From 1947-66 he was like the interwar voice of America. Speaking of America, I challenge you to find anything funnier than this Ginsberg recitation. America loves to construct  its icons with the seriousness of a dam project. So it's easy to forget that Ginsberg was funny as hell. By the end of the poem--after a chaste, attentive start--people are laughing their asses off. What's wrong with that?
 

KG: Nothing at all. On that score you’ve done our readership a great service by providing such a sterling interpretation of his opus, the often misunderstood "Howl." In fact, you trace a through-line from Blake and Keats and the Romantic tradition in England all the way to the present in order to create an antidote for American couch potatohood. It sounds like you had something of a conversion experience while reading the Beats and other beware-of-media literati like Don DeLillo.




The Author's Father

NB: Thanks, Kirpal. It’s funny. I’ve always had a natural aversion to TV. Maybe it’s part-Oedipal as my dad (Emmy-awarding winning TV pioneer John Ball) (PDF) was all about it, though in his own conflicted sort of way. It’s the universal slack jaw of the TV-watcher that confirmed my suspicions of TV as being an energy sink. The Beats, for example, had ants in their pants. Sheer mobility made them bad actors for the TV room. They kept to the road and avoided the spell. An admixture of high gas prices and HDTV informs the dull sustenance of the couch potato. You heard it here first. OPEC and Sony killed the Beats.

 

KG: Speaking of gas, your lampoon of Route-66 (the TV show) and its attempted neutering of Kerouac’s On the Road is a hoot. To you TV is the Great American Expropriator. Nothing is too sacred that it can’t be flattened, profaned and turned into an ad for jeans. I’m guessing your eye to the politics of American media technology was greatly served by your father’s work in close captioned TV? While working with him in DC you saw the selling of cable and community TV’s future up close. Before that, you’d been weaned on the BBC, yes?

NB: Yes, I cut my teeth quite literally on Bill and Ben the Flowerpot Men before emigrating to the States at the ripe old age of four. So I sort of internalized two television worldviews. I’m a walking TV dialectic. In fact I discuss the origins of the BBC in the book. As you bring up antidotes, I'm swallowing more Keatsian pills with each passing day. We start with this Vale of Soul-making, really a  laboratory whose ingredients are spirit and intellect. From there, we rub against earth’s afflictions, producing that stuff called soul. The mediated world diverts us from this direct Keatsian process. Indeed there are powers within our society that encourage this diversion for a host of reasons. Let's just say false consciousness is big business. My father was immersed in TV. But he hated it. He’d also be scratching his head over Keats, Rilke too. Poetry was not his bag. I also spent two decades in telecom in a variety of roles. During the writing of this book, I got the distinct privilege of corresponding  with George Stoney (the Father of Public Access Television) before his death last year. If you can believe it, George began his career in the FDR administration as a socialist firebrand (he was born in 1916)! He was a fascinating blend of social activism and technical know-how. He was lucid to the end and will be sorely missed.

KG: You got the Sixties' New Left philosophers down cold, too, and I found myself concurring with Adorno, Marcuse and Norman O. Brown: TV isn’t just prone to manipulation and distortion; it’s a diversionary device by design. Even the weather’s all wet. Everything is a lie and that’s the truth!

NB: I should hasten to add I'm not a Marxist. Actually I'm a homesick capitalist who mourns the current deformation that strives to drape itself in capitalist narrative, corpo-fascism. Jerry Mander was unequivocal. TV should be tossed into the dumpster. On the Weather Channel the postures of the on-the-scene reporters are often exaggerated during torrential rains and high winds to inject entertainment value and a sense of danger. So yes, the storms are suspect too.

KG: Be very afraid but don’t switch the channel because the sexy weather gal is about to have a wardrobe malfunction? Like Marcuse’s Domination Principle regarding “the establishment,” TV seems capable of absorbing any joke we can foist on it.  As you point out, it’s a shot of mad, greedy, tyrannical Moloch all the way. Yet your lampooning of our entrapment (cultural entrancement?) is more than just a hoot and a howl. I don’t think I’ll ever view “the tube” or surf the Net the same way again, and that’s the secret power of your book.

NB: I'm really not saying anything new in that regard. I'm hoping my cross-weaving of parallel narratives will coax inquisitive generalists like myself into a broadened debate. But yes, TV as vampire is part of the energy sink phenomenon. The Left knew their worker-led revolt was doomed due to TV mesmerism. So they scrambled, added 'New' to their brand name--you know, whiter-whites--and injected Freud because Marx alone wasn’t cutting it. Media is in the business of manufacturing  consent which is as much a psychological phenomenon as a political-economic one. Anyway it was all largely for naught. The proletariat is not about to stream out into the streets with a 70-inch sensaround box singing in the corner. You never know, in the mad rush to the Bastille another prole might sneak in and steal it. Ferlinghetti said it just this year: Ginsberg was dead on the money with Moloch. We sacrifice our children to him every Saturday morning. He feeds them Sugar Craps. They hand him limbs later on as teenage-mutant diabetic amputees. Moloch trades sugar for souls. Appendages are the appendices of the screen era.

KG: The book moves deftly among many topics that you manage to cohere into a single focus: your own immigrant’s tale, growing-up vignettes, insider lit lore, poetic leaps over philosophical matters and riffs most extraordinaire on Milton Berle, Father Knows Best, JFK’s assassination, inventor John Logie Baird, The Housewives of This 'n' That---you name it.

 

NB: Yes, I named it and then some. My point of origin was really the late David Foster Wallace’s 1993 essay e Unibus Pluram where he notes to his fellow fiction writers the overwhelming effect television has had on his (and my) generation. Ours was the first where television was not subsequently introduced into the home. It was the glowing a priori box in the corner. You can feel the difference in older writers such as John Ashbery in terms of their relationship to TV. At the time Wallace was writing the essay, I was immersed in management consulting circles breathlessly trumpeting the approach of the 500-channel universe. A few years ago a literary colleague who was familiar with my technology background asked if I’d read the Wallace piece. I hadn’t. After reading it, I felt a strong compunction to offer my own State of the Union, sort of a ‘where are we now’ twenty years later. Of course the Internet has happened in a big way since then too, which I cover extensively. The book went on to explode in a hundred directions from there because TV is like the Khyber Pass of our culture. As you mentioned a moment ago, it gets its mits on everything sooner or later.

KG: Your immigrant ‘observer’ status is yet one more mediating screen?
 

NB: Screens atop screens. The stranger’s eye often sees the obvious with a clarity unavailable to the habituated onlooker.

KG: So what does the title mean?  I know it is a translation from the second of poet Ranier Maria Rilke's Duino Elegies.

NB: Yes. Between River and Rock is part of a line from that elegy where Rilke posits a uniquely authentic human place apart from the machinations of capricious gods, of which Moloch would certainly be one. For me it means many things; the flitting images on the screen, the inanimate passivity of the viewer and the mediating space between. On a more personal level, it is the constant internal negotiation I engage in between my mother the Keatsian spirit and my father the Socratic inquisitor. Finally the book is about a child striking an immigrant's bargain between the fluidic, idealized mythos from whence he came and the hard realities to which he arrived. Like all of us, I am multiple iterations of a split-screen.

KG: So who is the book written for? Who is its target-market audience?

 

NB: Well it's not a learned treatise nor an academic discourse, that's for sure. It's something between an extended riff and a protracted romp where I drag in various voices from multiple spheres to keep the thread smart, alive and multifarious. The book targets intelligent, non-academic folks who think they’re losing their minds when in fact they're losing their souls, a far worse predicament. People like you and me, I guess. I meet them every day: bright, cowed, vaguely aware of a slow spiritual leak but unable to localize the fissure. Getting back to the slack-jawed TV face, I'm reminded again of lines from the Second Elegy (written in 1923): "suddenly, solitary mirrors: gathering their own out-streamed beauty back into their faces again." This is downright premonitory of the Media Age! I go into some detail about the way people dressed for TV in the 1950-52 era. It's funny to us now but the early adopters of TV would invite others over for a night of TV. Invariably people would dress as though it was a night at the opera. It took us a while to realize that we could veg out on the sofa because TV wasn't 'watching back'. Lassitude permissioned the couch potato in the TV room before spreading to the public space. In many ways, our self-regard got sucked through that damned screen. I believe we must retrieve ourselves from Wallace's "alone, together" isolation and gather our out-streamed beauty back from the beautiful and haughty deceptions that flicker endlessly on our screens. Media means us harm, you know. This is the Keatsian in me speaking, but for reasons that are not entirely clear, soul is real. Soul matters. Soul content can be expanded or it can be relinquished. Media eats soul for breakfast. To me, it’s become very elemental.

KG: What else ya got cooking, present and prior?

NB: As for the not-too distant past, I have two short-form essay collections How Can We Make Your Power More Comfortable? (2010, Del Sol Press) and The Frantic Force (2011, Petroglyph Books). The first is more politics-oriented. The second tends toward culture stuff, though both bleed profusely across that demarcation. My new Civil War musical play Sides (more on it here ) is partnered with Richard Stafford's play 'Yours'. Also, a guy by the name of Stephen Crane pitched a small novel of his The Red Badge of Courage into the mix too. (Actually Crane was a pushover as he no longer speaks up for himself and the novel's in the public domain.) Included are essays and commentary from a number of history experts. I'm really excited about it.

 

(Amazon, Kindle and other ePub forms)

Finally, I have a poetry collection coming out in 1Q 2014 from White Violet Press entitled Serpentrope.
 

 

KG: Where can people find you on-line?

NB: Well, returntoone@hotmail.com is a good email; also, Facebook is good for keeping up on things. I have hundreds of video on my Youtube channel and I keep up a Jung-Bowie blog, Red Book Red Sail here.

KG: Thanks so much, Norm.

NB: Thank you, Kirpal.

 

 

 

 

 

Seven Places in America: A Poetic Sojourn---An Interview with Miriam Sagan

 

KIRPAL GORDON: I first discovered your poems in the indie magazines of the late Seventies and early Eighties. Your lines produce a sense of the profound and what knocks me out about your style is that, though it seems inspired by Asian meditation practice, it’s “just so” without the cultural “scaffolding,” as if you’d grokked a tao-buddha-nondual appreciation of life in a hard-won American voice, the antidote to fawning imitation and authoritative replication. Philip Whalen once said that religions get weirder the further they travel from their home, but I wonder if you aren’t giving meditation practice a good name by not putting “legs on a snake.”

 

 

MIRIAM SAGAN: First of all, thank you. What a great thing to say. Phil Whalen was a very important person in my life. My then husband Robert Winson (died 1995) and I came to Santa Fe in 1984 along with Phil--they were setting up a zendo. Phil needed cossetting--he wanted to eat hamburgers and watch Dr. Who on BBC. We spent several years carting him about. He was never a teacher in a formal sense, but I learned a lot from him. He'd mark lines in my poems he hated with skulls and crossbones.

But what you are noticing is that I had some poetic practice before I ever encountered Buddhism. As a child I'd had raw experiences of just sort of accessing reality--they were surprising but secret. At 21 I almost died from a lung infection and spent months in the hospital. After that, reality as I knew it was very shaken and I went questing. Then poetry came along and I tried to match experience with language. Ideas in Buddhism--before that similar ideas in art (cubism, Merce Cunningham, John Cage)--would sometimes line up with my experiences.

I'm always amazed/amused when anthologized as a Buddhist poet because I've never thought of myself that way. Maybe a poet who was around a lot of Buddhists?

KIRPAL GORDON: You were at Harvard (undergrad) or Boston U (grad) when your lung became infected? What was almost dying like? Were you already putting out Aspect?


MIRIAM SAGAN: I went through Harvard in three years, and then didn't get into graduate school. I was spending a year trying to turn myself into a community based poet when I got sick, with what in retrospect doctors have told me was most likely Swine Flu. I was writing, teaching at the Cambridge Women's School and creative writing at the New England Conservatory of Music, and yes, had responded to Ed Hogan's plea for folks to read the slush pile at Aspect. I was a bit lost and vulnerable and had no health insurance--when the flu attacked my lungs I ended up in the Beth Israel Hospital where pain/surgery/morphine/and ICU induced psychosis put me into quite a different state from the intellectual/ political one I usually resided in. I had some classic near death experiences (soul leaves body, gates of light, etc.)--totally without context.

Months later when I left the B.I. I thought--well, I'm never going to do this again...i.e. die. Then had to amend it to "as an amateur." I went to the local TM center and got a mantra! (You can tell this was 1976!). I sort of followed the expected familial path for a bit--did go to grad school and stayed too long on the east coast...ran to San Francisco finally when I was 26.

 

 

KIRPAL GORDON: Regarding your getting anthologized with the Buddhists, you are certainly a poet who appreciates economy of expression and a vision that includes the hidden compliment of opposites, willing to embrace the spirit of a literary form without getting caught up in the letter of the form. For example:

 

the widow’s short skirt—

gossip about who

wanted the divorce

 

open pit copper mine—

in every Gideon’s Bible

The Book of Job

 

you tell me these ducks

don’t always mate for life

are you flirting with me?

 

Taken from All My Beautiful Failures, these sixty haikus published in your sixtieth year are not structured in the 5-7-5 syllable lines of traditional Japanese haiku, but they match D.T. Suzuki’s definition: “A haiku does not express ideas, but puts forward images reflecting emotions.”

 

 

MIRIAM SAGAN: My mentor in haiku was Elizabeth Searle Lamb, often called the American "first lady of haiku." She died some years ago, but she was practically a neighbor in Santa Fe, and even though we saw each other often we also corresponded--by postcard and email. She really favored the soft light approach to English language haiku, where lines are 5 syllables or less, 7 or less, 5 or less. Towards the end of her life I asked her if she had any advice for my students about haiku and she said, "well, I just do what I want." That was after a lifetime of study, but I did love the remark.

 

KIRPAL GORDON: Here’s the one that really stands out the most:

 

even in this

suburban neighborhood—

wild scat

 

It harkens back to your Seven Places in America: A Poetic Sojourn, published by Sherman Asher the year before, 2012, and your skill at working the edge that Robert Smithson called the“slurb”—the border ‘tween the suburban and the wild. Like many of the poets in the Taoist-Buddhist-Shinto traditions of China and Japan, you wander our outback of geological and historical sites and national parks.

 

 

MIRIAM SAGAN: As a child in N.J. I was kind of obsessed with the idea of "underneath"--archeology, or the woods, something under a suburban existence--powerful but hidden. Smithson of course was also from NJ. Did you know William Carlos Williams was his pediatrician? How cool is that! We once found a tiny chip of a Dutch tile digging a vegetable garden--I was as excited as if it had been a Viking ship.

I had this strong romantic desire to get "Out"--later heightened by leaving the east coast but when I really settled in Santa Fe these opposites seemed less clear...I started watching the boundary lines between things and it made me incredibly happy, even when some of those things were negative. As poetic material, it first became clear to me when I was writing about the Mexican/US border.

When I went to the Everglades in 2006 as an artist in residence in the park I was tremendously excited--everything seemed like a borderline, even my own mind. And yes, this state was created and heightened by solitude. I'm hardly immune to the delight of feeling like a Chinese poet hermit even while eating a tray of take out sushi from a convenience store.

 

 

KIRPAL GORDON: You end the book’s Introduction with an amusing remark your father made when you called him from the Everglades, “Where is the nearest jelly doughnut?”Reflecting on indicators of civilization, you conclude, “It is not possible to shed the old self just by changing geography. But it is possible to expand the self so that it includes not just a jelly doughnut but a more permeable boundary between self and landscape—the terrain of a poem.” I thought of Ol’ Lao’s wu wei principle, a model for Chinese landscape painters, when reading these lines from “10,000 Islands”:

 

Mangrove roots

Coated in oyster shells—

This is a border

as surely as between Ciudad Juarze and El Paso del Norte

Between sleep and waking

Between the evening star and his wife the morning star

Between the living and the dead

This is the border

Between land and water

That first division

After darkness and light

 

And these lines from “Shark Valley”:

 

past fifty myself

I’m still trying

to perfect the mix

of getting somewhere

and being there…

 

And the last lines of “The Folly”:

 

Pastel, the edge of rundown town

In the rain

Buildings painted pink, lavender, pale green

By the prison’s razor wire

And the truck with melons.

And along the side of the road

The poor go on walking

As they do

Everywhere.

 

The poetic line functions as the permeable boundary (intermediary? dissolve unit?) between self and scene. What a way to limn a landscape!

 

 

MIRIAM SAGAN: I had a map tacked up on the wall. The Everglades has three non-contiguous sections. I'm not a bold driver, and I'd freak out in Miami traffic, but I was determined to see the whole park. So it was a very physical process--crossing in and out of the park and the highly contrasted south Florida. A white knuckle experience in traffic! But it was good poetic practice--not getting stuck in one place or point of view.

 

 

KIRPAL GORDON: Another quality most admirable in these sojourn poems of a more or less chronological sequence from 2006 to 2009 is that your three-line observations placed side by side actually build a narrative. I’m thinking of your “Sketches in a Notebook”:

 

a lizard

living

in a rolled up shade

 

 

child pats the palm tree

ignores

the alligator

 

 

tree snail gleams

in the leaf’s canopy—

stolen ghost orchid

 

 

MIRIAM SAGAN: Adding in the sequences of the three liners helped me continue that practice of brevity. In a way, what I was seeing in unfamiliar and remote places both had narrative and stop-on-a-dime moments of perception. I've always felt a tension in my work between these two streams--interestingly adding the prose essays and integrating the three-liners so they are a kind of haibun helped.

 

 

KIRPAL GORDON: Your next sojourn is in your own New Mexico backyard, “forty acres of land, pinon and juniper,” what you called “the familiar made strange.” I liked the opening line of your seven-sectioned “Laundry Line Koan,” “Nothing is blank, darling.” Here’s “2. Two Blue Circles”:

 

The artist

Wanted to plant

A circle of bluebonnets here

But they wouldn’t grow

In the desert soil.

Instead, he constructed

A circle of blue grass.

 

The neighbors were meth addicts

Hard characters, who yelled

And fought. When the screaming started

Their children went into

The circle of blue grass—

Stood in the center

Of a safe place.

 

Another artist

Also wanted to build a circle

On the land.

He sent exact

Specifications by mail

Dimensions to be raked

Into the earth.

But this did not create

A perfect circle in sod.

Rather, it evolved, and a gopher

Dug a hole in the perimeter.

Then it rained

And the circle’s interior

Bloomed with flax.

The circle was filled with blue flowers.

A third circle,

Drawn on blue chalk

On the sidewalk

By me as a girl

Washes away in the rain.

 

You describe The Land/An Art Site as “an artistic incubator.” In terms of context, “Two Blue Circles” is part of a poetic map or on-site installation? It also calls to mind Robert Smithson’s remark, “Earth’s surface and the figments of the mind have a way of disintegrating.”

 

 

MIRIAM SAGAN: Installations on The Land are low or no impact. I never saw these circles, just the remains of one but heard the stories. The stories were more permanent. Also, they reminded me that the rural isn't bucolic--it can be crime ridden and harsh. But also that art has almost magical qualities to save a person.

 

 

KIRPAL GORDON: The Santa Fe River, “designated America’s most endangered river,” is your next “pilgrimage” site. Comparing “the mighty Hudson River” you knew from your NJ childhood with the dry river you know from adulthood, you show us “Randall Davey Audobon Center”:

 

Walled garden set

Among dry hills.

 

Fountain, a simple stone

Bubbles over—

 

Talking water

Out of the living rock,

 

Hummingbird,

Orange-tipped winged black butterfly,

 

Yellow butterfly on a field of lavender,

Yarrow.

 

Like any Impressionist

I sit on the bench in my straw hat:

 

Creation is born

Of name and water.

 

 

You write that “water fills my dreams. When I was pregnant and after my daughter was born, I often dreamed of us in the water.”

 

MIRIAM SAGAN: Well, I was a water poet before I came to the desert. As a child, the Atlantic ocean--Jersey shore, Cape Cod--was basically the only access I had to real natural beauty. Well, maybe the Palisades too on the Hudson River. All water. When I was four years old I saw the moon rise over Cape Cod and realized--I'm seeing something beautiful. It was the first time my experience had an aesthetic label. So the high desert was a bit of a shock. The land really scared me at first. I once couldn't hike across some basin land but had to follow railroad tracks--it gave me agorophobia.

 

 

KIRPAL GORDON: The Petrified Forest in northern Arizona is your next stop. In “The Tepees,” the first section of “Views of the Painted Desert” you write:

 

Sunrise over the Painted Desert

Dawn’s striations illuminate

Colored hands of the Chinle Formation

Lava cap, white sandstone, dark red iron stained siltstone

Red house of hematite

And the dark carboniferous layer of life.

 

Pangaea broke and floated south

You might name these layers of sediment

Call them:

The trip we took in 1965,

The year my heart broke,

The day I moved to San Francisco,

The wedding day, the cremation,

That nice time we had

With the kids in the motel swimming pool,

An east coast rainy afternoon.

 

The present sits on top

I’m here alone

Where earth has pitched her tents

Where wind wears things down

And continental drift

Builds things up.

Rolling in and rolling out

The low sea is gone

For the moment

Or eon.

 

What was it like in your cabin built by the CCC back in the 1930s? Did you choose the Petrified Forest National Park or would you say it chose you?

 

 

MIRIAM SAGAN: I'm constantly applying to the parks for residencies, but they are difficult to get. So yes, you could say it chose me! Plus it was a special place in my childhood. The cabin was small but comfy--except that the doors rattled all night long in the spring wind. I was essentially the only person IN the park--rangers were housed outside. So it was very intense at night--if crowded by day! The park staff was wonderfully helpful, and took me to see some amazing things.

 

 

KIRPAL GORDON: In “Secret Garden Trail,” at Stone Quarry Hill Art Park in Cazenovia, New York, you write:

 

Why must inspiration be a visa?

Remembered peonies are beaten down by rain

Into their impressionistic essence.

A formal garden in the mind’s eye

Blurs in all this mist

And the dark alley between trees

Is scattered with pine cones, cinquefoil, trillium.

In a sculpture garden

Even the mushrooms

Seem placed on purpose.

Once, half-lost, I turned into a cul-de-sac

And saw through a gap

A pond full of water lilies

In all directions---

An inner self

That also shifts shape.

 

These lines struck me as a sort of Ars Poetica for your project. The poems in this section, which include meditations on Elizabeth Cady Stanton at Seneca Falls and a field trip to the Oneida community, are also part of a “Poetry Field Guide” commissioned by the Art Park?

 

 

MIRIAM SAGAN: I went off to this sculpture garden in upstate New York with a full project in mind. I wanted to make a "guide" to the sculpture that was a poetry pamphlet...you'd stop and look and read, like a version of a museum guide. But the map of New York was overexciting and I started to include all kinds of visionary and utopian social movements from the 19th century. So the park itself became a kind of paradise inside of a landscape housing more ideal visions. The pamphlet, which was given away free to several hundred visitors, isn't identical with the section in the book, though--dropped some and yes added some too.

 

 

KIRPAL GORDON: The great earthworks of native civilizations in the American southeast and midwest, including the mounds of Cahokia along the Mississippi River, become over the next two years, your sixth sojourn spot. Once again, all the poems in this section moved me, but your lines about middens, those mounds containing shells, animal bones and other refuse that indicate the site of a human settlement, struck a deep chord:

 

 

Shell middens haunted my childhood

Where were they—those great piles?

 

Left behind by people older than my grandparents

And long gone.

 

On the beaches of what will be Manhattan

Or in the Everglades mangrove swamp of standing trees

 

How people who never saw mountains

Built them, platforms for the gods

 

And there are others too

Beneath the earth

 

With the bones arranged

Tidied for re-birth

 

Motif of the bird of prey

The mortuary mounds

 

That in this light seem so benign

Seem to swell away

 

In a sea of grass

Where you can picnic

 

On Memorial or Father’s Day

And not have to ask

 

What is underneath

 

As in the other sections, the call to dig under the surface of things never had a more apt metaphor. It seems both a personal statement as well as an artistic one about life in the USA. Do you think as a nation that we’re in flight from the past?

 

 

MIRIAM SAGAN: A good question--I'd say we're more in flight from the TRUTH about the past. We have patriotic or ready made histories--I was raised on those in elementary school. And then there is revisionist history, which attempts to right wrongs, but which can limit things too. I'd say we lack a mytho-poetic past. Whose past is it? How can it be everyone's in some authentic way? Hart Crane's "The Bridge" is a good example of attempting this, but poets concentrate more on individual histories. I was raised on tales of the Classical world and that is kind of a pagan alternative to the present--I'm still searching for richness in what underlies contemporary America.

 

 

KIRPAL GORDON: The Andrews Experimental Forest in the Pacific Northwest is your final destination. Here’s “A Different Forest”:

 

The woman at the hot springs

Asks what brings me here

I say I’m staying in the forest

But she mishears

And thinks I’ve come to visit

A local boy named Forrest

Who lies unconscious in the hospital

After a terrible car wreck.

 

I don’t want to be reminded

Of the descansos on old Las Vegas Highway

Four crosses in pastels and purples

For the kids killed that night

By a drunk driver

Or the sound my daughter’s friend made

When she heard,

A sound beyond weeping.

 

Logging trucks go by in the midst

Like a line of oversized hearses

All round me

The forest is awake

With its moss-draped yew trees

Its beetles and fungi stirring in a tree trunk

To ferny soup.

Only I am sleeping.

 

 

That last line seems properly ambiguous, and it’s here in this old growth forest setting in the lower Cascades that you write, “I felt the intersection of humankind and the wild.” You conclude your prose remarks with, “The forest itself was of course a vast compost. And so it seemed was my imagination.” What a hopeful way to end this seven sojourned, cross-country adventure.

 

 

MIRIAM SAGAN: Thank you! The sojourn in the forest was utterly refreshing. It was also a dark time of year--autumn headed towards winter solstice. Although the experience was one of decay and death it was also peaceful and fecund. I didn't realize I was writing this book until I was at Andrews.

 

 

KIRPAL GORDON: In addition to having published 23 other books besides Seven Places in America and All My Beautiful Failures, you lead an active life as a teacher, poetry advocate and founder/director of the creative writing program at Santa Fe Community College. What has that been like and do you ever think of retiring?

 

 

MIRIAM SAGAN: The activity that really speaks to me right now is text installation. I've been working with sculptors and other artists to put poetry in some unusual or unexpected places. Recently collaborated with textile artist Alisa Dworsky on a large piece that floats up a wall and a series of doves with text with ceramacist Christy Hengst. These were shown lats summer at 516 Gallery in Albuquerque. Right now I'm trying to initiate "Haiku in the Hood" which will look like road signs. I lie in the bath tub and get dozens of ideas, jot them down, and try them. Some heavy lifting here--these projects take more time, money, and collaboration than writing a book but I find it thrilling.
If I ever retire from community college, my goal is to do more installation. Poets don't exactly retire of course from poetry. But I'm aware that at 60 my time and energy have limits--I'm try to discover and engage these limits.
Creating the program at Santa Fe Community College has been wonderful. I based the curriculum on what I thought and observed students were drawn to and needed. The program includes visual arts, a one on one tutorial, and a literary magazine internship. I drew a lot of what I knew--from Harvard to my small press roots--together to share it.

 

 

 

KIRPAL GORDON: How can readers at the Giant Steps Press blog stay in closer tough what all of what you do?

MIRIAM SAGAN: Check out my blog Miriam's Well http://miriamswell.wordpress.com. I'm always looking for contributors.
Thank you! This was very inspiring.