Query Letters
Q: Grant Peeples says he doesn’t like your query letters.
He knows you do it on purpose, but you’re sabotaging yourself.
A: I just wrote a query letter to an agent who specializes in young adult (YA) fiction. The Bildungsroman. WRITER is a Bildungsroman, and it appeals to young adults.
It’s not a YA novel per se, but what was I reading in high school? Huckleberry Finn, The Catcher in the Rye, Nineteen Eighty-four.
Norman Mailer’s Advertisements for Myself. On the Road. This was before Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, but when it came out, I caught the allusion, because I had read Kierkegaard.
I had read Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. In high school.
Readers read. They read good books. They don’t read YA fiction.
Also, Grant singles out what became WRITER as a book that read right along, without the dates and headings. It just flowed.
I sent her the first five pages of WRITER.
It does flow. It sucks you in.
I’m not a mainstream writer I’m a maelstrom writer.
That’s what appeals to high school students.
The Wakulla Volcano. Not The
Bridges of
The Bridges of Madison County is for housewives. I liked the movie. When I want a good cry. Or a good laugh. At the clichés.
I was reading Henry Miller’s Nights of Love and Laughter in high school. Because Tropic of Cancer was still banned.
It also appeals to 70-year-olds who look at the television, and say, What the fuck!
Q: What happened? What just happened?
A: Brenda watched an Amercian Masters series
about Merle Haggard on PBS, and it talked about Buck Owens, and Bonnie, and
Q: There’s also a chapbook. Tough Company.
A: Yes. Interviews and letters.
I don’t know if kids are reading that. I know I would be. I would hear about it and buy it on the Internet.
Little Jack Horton, the sideshow midget, as Aimee Semple McPherson. Swap Meets for Jesus. Dueling black and poor-white-trash holyrollers.
Q: The right wing was full of shit when you were in high school.
A: Yes, and we knew it.
They didn’t teach it in high school civics.