Way back in the late-aughts when I was teaching workshops to nonprofits and writers on how to promote themselves in the brave new "web 2.0" world, I would explain that the sites with the biggest hits offered cheap snark and porn. You can't beat their numbers, I would say, and you shouldn't try. Your job is to use these new platforms to connect with readers. Remember those innocent days? By the time 2016 staggered to a close, I felt like I'd been beaten flat as a sheet of newsprint by what social media has become. Like many other people, I stepped back from social media in 2017. In fact, I stepped back from the internet. I redoubled my commitment to my writing, and I thought hard about what I want to write and why I do it. I was tired of staring at screens and wanted to do more in real life. I wanted make things people could hold in their hands. The first zine I produced in December is called Protest 101. I started contacting indie bookstores, and soon it was being sold in cities from LA to Chicago to Baltimore (see below for the full list). I proposed a workshop of the same title to Trade School LA, and taught it several times at Book Show and other venues in the leadup to the January 21 Women's March, and several times since. I stopped thinking tweet-length thoughts and I started thinking in zines. My second zine was How to Recognize Voter Suppression in its Habitat Naturel. The third in what I'm now calling The Democracy Series is a pocket guide to How to Change the World. More are in the works. Then I responded to an artist call. Protest 101, accompanied by photos of it in action, were selected to be exhibited at the Irvine (CA) Fine Art Gallery as part of their All Media 2017 show. For a limited time, you can buy a copy of the zine at the Gallery. I'm now the proud owner of a long-arm stapler, and can tell 24 lb. paper from 20 lb. by touch. I'm also spending more time face-to-face with friends. I even leave my phone at home. Sometimes. And you can buy my zines at all these wonderful indie bookstores:
Photo at the Jan 21 Women's March in Los Angeles by Alan Nakagawa
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And you are, aren't you?
Allow me to recommend a few books I read this year and loved. These books are anything but boring and predictable, and they're all from terrific independent presses. I reviewed them at The Next Best Book blog - click the links below to read my reviews. Nigerians in Space by Deji Bryce Olukotun Unnamed Press (2014) I'll Be a Stranger to You by Cara Diaconoff Outpost19 (2011) Bessarabian Stamps by Oleg Woolf translated by Boris Dralyuk Phoneme Media (2015) New Finnish Grammar by Diego Marani translated by Judith Landry Melville House (2013) Us Conductors by Sean Michaels Tin House Books (2014) Don't forget! You always get bonus points from the literary community when you buy your books at a locally-owned, independent bookstore. If the reader in your life is secretly (or otherwise) a writer, consider the gift of writing classes. Writers at Work in Los Angeles is a wonderful place to hone your craft and find the support a writer needs to kickstart a new project or see one through to the end. I wouldn't be the writer I am today without Writers at Work. Gift certificates are now available: I've been a bit busy lately, traveling, reading, and somehow finding time to fit in a bit of writing too. On February 6, I read at Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle. It was a great chance to catch up with old friends and meet some new ones. The Stranger listed my reading at one of the top five things to do in town that day. Then I traveled to Charlotte, NC, in between winter storms to read on February 22 at Park Road Books, another great indie bookstore. I baked cookies (we authors aren't above bribing potential readers!), sold all the books in stock and had a great conversation. As we reminisced about 1989, someone reminded us of another major event I hadn't remembered when I wrote my Year in Review, 25 Years Later blog post: Hurricane Hugo. Hurricanes don't usually travel so far inland, and this one knocked out power, tossed Charlotte's famous trees around like they were matchsticks, and left almost 100,000 people homeless from Cape Verde to Lake Erie. Coming up on Sunday, March 8, my work is getting the New Short Fiction treatment on stage at the Federal Bar in North Hollywood. Professional actors - they have IMDb entries and everything! - will be reading four of my short stories. Click here for more info and to buy tickets. We're calling the event, Democracy and Other Stories. I'll also be appearing on a panel on Community Supported Arts: A New/Old Way to Think about the Relationship Between Writers and Readers at the Mennonite/s Writing VII: Movement, Transformation and Place writing conference in Fresno on Friday, March 13. Rhonda Langley, Julia Baker and I will talk about our independent projects seeking to connect readers and writers, in the busy postmodern era. Rhonda and Julia have a couple of great projects that you should definitely check out if you can't make it to the conference. I'll be talking about GuerrillaReads and an essay I wrote about applying food movement concepts to literature. In the more distant future, I'll be traveling to Chicago in early June for appearances at the Reading Under the Influence series and City Lit Books. More details coming soon. I recently had a chance to spend three days (plus an evening) in the beautiful city of Lisbon. Cobblestone streets, wide open plazas and the gentle churning of the Teju River, all accompanied by the zhhh-zhhh sound of spoken Portuguese. Once I'd learned how to properly order uma bica e um pastel de nata, my most basic needs were met. There was rain, and plenty of it. Living with drought teaches you to love precipitation in all its forms. I destroyed a pair of leather boots walking through history in the rain, and discovered my umbrella has holes in it. I enjoyed every minute of it. Before the trip I got hold of a copy of The Lives of Things (Objecto Quase), a collection of short stories by José Saramago, the Portuguese writer who took the Nobel for Literature in 1998. The first story in the collection tells his imagined history of the actual deck chair whose collapse led to the unexpected death of right-wing dictator António Salazar in 1968. The Centaur is his brilliant and breathtaking story where its horse and human halves are at war with each other, physically, emotionally and erotically. How, for example, can a horse lie down to sleep in a way that will also be comfortable for a man? A political parable, to be sure, but also a heartbreaking story. I stopped in at Livraria Bertrand, located aptly on Rua Garrett, as any book lover must. After all, it claims to be the oldest bookstore in the Western world. There I picked up a copy of two books by Portugal's wonderfully oddball poet, Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935), Disquiet Lisbon and a bilingual edition of O Que O Turista Deve Ver/What the Tourist Should See. Like Saramago, Pessoa is one of Portugal's great literary treasures. In addition to his own poetry, he's particularly known for creating a host of alter egos who wrote poetry, were published in leading journals of their day, and even reviewed each others' work. Any chance it's coincidence his last name is also the Portuguese word for person? A day later, I'm walking under the giant cedar in the middle of the Jardim do Príncipe Real when I spot a VW camper van by the side of the road with matching shelves, quite obviously selling books. I go for a closer look and discover Tell A Story, a small mobile bookstore in a refitted VW camper van that has recently branched out into publishing English language translations of Portuguese writers. Turns out I've already bought two of their books. Disquiet Lisbon is their truncated edition in English of Pessoa's larger work, The Book of Disquiet. I'd also bought their edition of Jesus Christ Drank Beer by Afonso Cruz, a prize-winning novel I can't seem to find anywhere on the English interwebs. The guy I chat with at the Tell A Story van says literature and bookstores are doing fairly well in Portugal, and he suggests a trip to the bookstore at LX Factory, the former textile manufacturing facility-turned-hipster art center. It's a loooong walk down there, and along the way I'm stopped by French tourists in need of directions. Never mind the fact I was fairly lost at that point. But I eventually find my way to the expansive, book-filled Ler Devagar. The bookstore's name translates as "read slowly." Which of course I think we all should do. There's so much more to literary Lisbon: watching tourists take photos of themselves arm in arm with the statue of Pessoa; the antiquarian bookstore with dozens of political posters from the anti-colonial movements in Angola and Mozambique. I'll just end here with a quote from Pessoa's disquietude, and a few more photos. "The part of my life not wasted in thinking up confused interpretations of nothing at all, has been spent making prose poems out of the incommunicable feelings I use to make the unknown universe my own." If you know indie publishing, then you know Akashic Books. Founded by punk rocker Johnny Temple and an early denizen of the Brooklyn literary scene, Akashic's slogan is Reverse-gentrification of the literary world. The publishing house first made a name for itself with books by such emerging authors as Nina Revoyr and Chris Abani. Akashic has also had a strong focus on authors from the Caribbean, and they established a highly successful place-based noir series from authors and cities all over the world. Then they hit the big time with their children's book for adults, Go the F*ck the Sleep, which is now available in a Jamaican patois translation and an audio version read by the snake man himself, Samuel L. Jackson. Akashic also has a couple of themed web series with very short stories (750 words max): Their noir series, Mondays are Murder, is followed by stories of parental misadventure on Terrible Twosdays and finally their drug-induced Thursdaze. Each series is updated every week with new, original fiction, and is free to read. At only 750 words per story, you can get your literary fix while waiting in line at your favorite third-wave coffeeshop, and they're a much better way to while away those empty in-between moments than the latest Flappy Bird replacement. My own very short story, The Preaching Game, was recently published on Mondays Are Murder. It's set in Charlotte, North Carolina, where there are so many churches you'll die before you can visit them all. Read it right now. |
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May 2018
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