Steve Almond says he'd like to write
a book of short stories, a nonfiction book, a novel, and a book of poems.
And a play and a screenplay. But not a memoir.
He has written, and published,
a book of short stories, My Life in Heavy Metal, and a nonfiction book, Candy
Freak: A Journey Through the Chocolate Underbelly of America.
He tried
a novel and decided he wasn't ready for one yet. He has written a few poems, but
not enough for a collection.
He teaches, but is trying to get away from it.
To write books that sell enough copies so he doesn't have to teach.
No,
wait. He has another book of short stories out. The Evil B. B. Chow.
I guess he can sell short story collections.
When asked if he doesn't feel
any pressure to write, or "produce" long fiction, he says, "I've felt
pressure to produce long fiction as long as I've been writing fiction (around 10
years)."
However, he wants to view his efforts to write a novel "as
a function of my own artistic aspirations rather than a good career move."
I followed my own artistic aspirations. It was a bad career move.
I wrote
a body of work, my stack, and invented a form to present it in, daily typewriting.
The components of this oeuvre, or uncollected collected works, included short
stories, poems, books of poems, novellas, novels, series of related novels, memoirs,
criticism, literary theory, travel books, screenplays, plays, treatments for a screenplay,
alphabets, and glossaries, at the end, often several forms in the same book, for
example a book that switched back and forth between novel and diary, or a novel,
or diary, that contained poems. And photographs and line art.
This variety,
and output (264 books), made all but a handful of books friends published, or I published
myself (eight of them: Screed, Common Sense, Full Plate, Blue Darter, Lost Writings,
Evil Genius, Open Book, Forty), pamphlets, chapbooks, and four-page sheets
I published (172 of them), or books I posted on the worldwide web (76, at last count),
unpublishable, by New York.
Could all those books be unworthy of publication
by New York, or is something else operating?
I think it's fair to say that
if you write too much, in too many different forms, New York won't take you serious.
You are a crank.
And if you publish what you can yourself, in pamphlets,
or on the Internet, that confirms the suspicion. Tinfoil hat.
You're digging
your own tomb.
* * *
But you do establish a reputation as an underground writer in small press,
zine, or ezine circles. Eventually even a legendary status. A reputation as a legend
of the underground.
I called a pamphlet I wrote to give away, or sell, at
events like Philly Zine Fest 2005, detailing my experience as an underground writer,
Underground Writer Makes Good.
I made good.
I'd rather have
done what I did, under the conditions I did it under, than do what many more successful
writers have done, because of what you have to give up to get the means to do what
they did.
It comes down to what do you want to do. Who are you going to
be.
You can't throw in with the bastards and be a rebel both. If you are
a rebel, they aren't going to have anything to do with you, for a very long time.
Is you is or is you ain't an existentialist.
* * *
Look. People know this, about corporations.
They know how mean,
greedy, and unscrupulous corporations are, how they spew out doubletalk and fairytales,
and how they blacklist and destroy anyone who tells the truth about how they work.
Well, publishing companies are corporations. Writing programs are training camps
for corporations.
If you are a self-taught, do-it-yourself writer, and you
tell the truth about the War Heads in book publishing, book reviewing in the media
of mass communication, giving out grants and literary prizes in arts agencies and
foundations, or working for a university, another corporation, as a literary critic
or writing instructor, all of those people will try to ruin you, because you make
them look bad. Like the apparatchiks in the Soviet Writers Union who voted to expel
Solzhenitsyn to keep their dachas and their chit books at the nomenklatura store,
or the East German writers who informed on each other to the secret police.
Birds of a feather flock together. And all peck at the outlaw in their midst, like
monkeys in the Lincoln Park Zoo.