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Update: Well, that was quick. All ten copies have been claimed. Thanks for playing!

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Mohr’s latest novel, Damascus, rounds out a trio of novels he’s written about the Mission District of San Francisco. Together the books form an accurate, memorable portrait of the place, or at least of one aspect of its seedy underbelly.

I’m not going to pretend that this is an objective interview in any way. Joshua and I frequent many of the same places, and have had many a chat about art and life. What follows is a bit of a chat between friends who are also both writers. We conducted this interview via email over the course of a few weeks.

***

The Rumpus: So, you’ve been working on a 3-book project called the Mission Cycle. How do Some Things that Meant the World to Me and Termite Parade form a trilogy with Damascus?

Joshua Mohr: These novels are love letters to San Francisco, specifically the Mission district, my home for many years.  I wanted to write a cycle that characterized the Mission from a post-9/11 perspective.  I love Michelle Tea’s Valencia.  It’s an amazing book and it characterizes the neighborhood from a late 90s point of view. I wanted to talk about the changes that have occurred in the years since.

I initially conceived that each book in the cycle would take place in the fall of 2007, and the first two did; however, Damascus didn’t work when placed there.  It needed the emergency, the immediacy of 2003 as a backdrop—when San Francisco was ferociously angry about America’s invasion (re-invasion) of Iraq.  I’m not sure if you remember the protests, but we voiced our anti-war sentiments as loudly as we could.  The book needed that animosity to create the right velocity on the page.

And it’s not a trilogy, in that you have to read book 1, then book 2, etc. Each novel is a stand-alone piece of art. If a reader chooses to read more than one, they certainly will see shared images, characters, themes, and geography, but being familiar with the others isn’t necessary to read Damascus.

Rumpus: It’s really interesting to me that you felt you needed the backdrop of the invasion of Iraq to give the book an urgent undercurrent, because my initial impression was that Damascus is much looser and even kind of upbeat in a weird way, as contrasted with your first two books, which I found much bleaker—I feel like Damascus is a much more affirmative book than the others. Do you see it in a similar light?

Mohr: I like that you used the word “looser” to describe the book. It’s an ensemble piece with probably seven main characters. So the reader hops amongst them, following the specific crises in each of their lives and how they intersect. My goal was to try and structure it like an old Robert Altman script from the 70s.  I dig those old movies, like Nashville.

As for the hopefulness, I’m glad you picked up on that. I’ve gotten off booze and drugs over the last couple years. My world has more joy in it now, and that can’t help but seep into my art. My preoccupations—or at least the way I want to convey those preoccupations on the page—is evolving. It’s amazing how much better you feel about yourself when your days don’t include cocaine nosebleeds.

Rumpus: Speaking of connections between the three books, I really enjoyed the scene where some of the characters from your first two books made cameo appearances. Did you ever have it in mind to bring the same characters back to play more of a role in the book, or was this always going to be just a little nod to your longtime readers?

Mohr: Maybe it’s like having children and I’m the parent: I didn’t want to play favorites. I had to buy everyone an ice cream cone, or there’d be serious sulking on the way home. So if Damascus is the culminating book in the cycle—the grand finale—it felt right to have the other main characters come on stage and take a quick bow.

Rumpus: I was struck by the use, in both Termite Parade and Damascus, of a conceptual artist’s project in each plot—and in both books, the art projects are simultaneously ridiculous and horrifying, which is an interesting combination. At least as I recall, in Termite Parade the art project was a kind of counterpoint to the main narrative, but in Damascus it is actually a driving narrative, in that it sets the stage for the central conflict in the book.

Mohr: I dig writing about artists because those are my people. And I like test-driving other avenues of being subversively expressive, other ways to document all the things I see in the world around me that are so confusing. Art is a way to participate in the dialogue that’s been happening since scribbles on cave walls: art is a person’s way to try and make sense of the world around them. Whether you’re writing magical realism or making surrealistic short films, they’re inherently related to our zeitgeist. Nobody creates in a vacuum.

Someone just asked me if Damascus is a protest novel. I didn’t know how to answer. My instinct is to say no—that it’s only about a small cast of wayward souls trying to figure out how to do right by themselves. But certainly, it’s a story charged with the political and social climate of our times. The war rages outside our houses, our dive bars, whether we want to acknowledge its presence or not. There’s no vacuum even when we want there to be one or try to insulate ourselves.

Rumpus: So do you have any ideas in place about your next book (or trilogy), or is that something you plan to think about after you’re back from your tour?

Mohr: A few months back, I was re-watching The Big Lebowski, and I thought to myself: the Coens must have had a fucking blast writing that movie. I want to do something fun in my next novel. My goal with this new project is to get way out of my comfort zone, challenge myself to flex some different muscles. So I’m writing this weird fairy tale, with all kinds of magic and oddball characters and bad jokes.

I think it’s really important as an artist that once you start noticing habits, tics, patterns in your work that you need to shove yourself off into uncharted territory. I don’t want to keep saying the same things, but want to see if I’m up to the task of communicating in varied ways. It’s sort of like the band AC-DC. They’ve written the same song 80 times.  I don’t want to be like that. I want to be like The Flaming Lips, where you don’t know what to expect until you pick up the new piece of art and plug your mind into it.

***

Read the Rumpus Review of Damascus.

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So much of our lives disappear. The small things like flakes of skin, the funny lines we’ve said, our “profound” drunken ramblings, kisses, breaths – where do they go? Lost, it seems forever. That’s until someone like Joshua Mohr comes along to sweep the streets of our days. In his third novel, Damascus, Mohr acts as part author, part alcoholic anthropologist, combing the hidden places to gather all that we’ve left behind.

He picks up the fragments of our lives and ferrets out our true desires.

Set in a dive bar aptly named Damascus (etymology: “a well-watered place”) the story revolves around a motley crew. There’s Owen, the owner of Damascus, whose life is summed up by his unfortunate Hilter-mustache birthmark. He’s got a well-meaning lesbian poet niece, Daphne, her best friend, rebel-artist Syl, and what would a bar be without its cast of regular drunks? There’s Shambles, a part-time prostitute, No Eyebrows, a stage-four cancer patient who ran away from his wife and daughter, and Byron Settles, an unsettled veteran back from Iraq. As we all know, a book set in a dive bar can’t end well, and from the get-go we’re aware this tale will end in tears. When you put cancer, Iraq, alcoholism and self-loathing together and shake, everyone knows that cocktail is called a suicide, and it’s served on the rocks. Somehow, though, Mohr manages to make that drink taste life-affirming.

There’s two main narrative threads; the first is a pro-protest story that revolves around Syl’s art show at Damascus in which she hangs twelve paintings of dead soldiers, and then during a live performance nails live fish to the paintings, letting them wriggle until they die. The brouhaha over the art show spirals out of control when a group of war veterans, fueled by Byron Settles, bring their own interpretation to the artwork, along with some tear gas. Mohr makes a political statement by asking, what are the consequences of saying nothing? What is worse – to speak out or to cower in silence? Both options, as we see elucidated in the pages of the book, have their price.

The other, more powerful thread, is the love story between Shambles and No Eyebrows. Both estranged from love, they find one another behind the pretense of peppermint schnapps and prostitution, and it’s one of the most sincere human exchanges I’ve read in a while. They build a relationship that investigates the spaces in which they’ve been hiding from the world. There’s a breathtaking scene in a cab that is a deftly rendered metaphor for the difficult stages of early love. Inside the taxi, No Eyebrows begs Shambles to spend the night with him (an exception she makes for no one). He’s on his deathbed, and she’s debating whether or not to go through with it. “Shambles drew a curlicue on the glass, a claustrophobic shape closing in on itself…Her finger reached the center of the curlicue. Trapped. She pulled it off the glass at the center of the shape because there was nowhere else to go. He wasn’t asking her to sleep in his bed. He was asking for a miracle.” Their conversation is stunted with silence until the cab driver interrupts them, “We’ll have to go back the way we came.” And back the way we came is where we go, as Damascus trudges through the characters’ pasts, attempting to make sense of their mistakes.

Joshua Mohr

Their love story is so moving in part because you expect so little between two people with nothing left to live for. Yet there’s so much tenderness between the ravaged duo. In a painfully sweet moment, Shambles says to No Eyebrows, “I like the way your hands shake….I love the portacath in your shoulder. It’s the secret way into you….” There is no greater achievement than being able to locate the sacred in the profane, to raise the light out of the dark, to find the sage in the alcoholic. As Mohr makes sense of our illogical drunken ramblings, he also finds the human element in characters most often overlooked. We’re used to keeping our waywards inside. What happens when they stand in the light?

Throughout Damascus, Mohr uses the power of fictive omniscience in its most glorious role. While often times the authorial stance of omniscience creates a sense of remove and is taken for granted by authors, Mohr employs it to bring us closer to people, to rest our ears against the tick-tick of their hearts. He treats the characters as though they’re real and cautiously reveals their innermost secrets.

On top of the hefty dose of empathy, Damascus is a page-turner. Mohr’s got an inherent ability to spin a yarn; it’s as if he’s standing over your shoulder lighting each page with a match as you read. Not to mention the book is funny, despite the heightened, depressing state of affairs. As the book aptly notes, “Humor was weird like that, triggered in all kinds of tactless ways.”

One of the book’s only faults is akin to the decision of whether or not to have that next drink. Mohr makes the mistake of getting too word-drunk, and at times the writing borders on prolix. But after all, the book is set in a dive bar, which makes me prone to forgive Mohr for his occasional excess. When an author has been so generous with their characters, so unflinching in allowing them to be human, as a reader, the least I can do is buy the next round.

Ultimately the book is about sacrifice, about the price of things. It’s about what happens when we leave our partners and try to come home like stray dogs; when we give up our dignity and threaten to burn someone alive; when we try to take a stand against war. As the reckless veteran Sam in Mohr’s novel says, “Most of life is no-win situations, kid.” Yet in the midst of not winning, we can claim our small victories. We can redeem ourselves and sober up for a moment enough to tell someone we love them.

In the end we disappear too, but if we’re lucky, someone has been gathering all of the things strewn behind us. Damascus is a scrapbook of all the things from our lives we worried would get lost in the wind.

And for the artists out there, the ones of us who are afraid and hiding, shy of ever finishing our own books, Mohr has a love letter for us too: “The show must go on, folks, so it might as well go on with you. It ain’t as easy as it looks, that I can guarantee, but trust me on this: it’s better to be heckled than be invisible, better to spin the wheel and play the game than watch from the sidelines. So carpe diem and all that other rah-rah shit…..any courageous souls out there want to get up and give it a shot?”

I can drink to that.

**

Read the Rumpus Interview with Joshua Mohr here!

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Rumpus friend Joshua Mohr recently sat down for a chat with Patrick DeWitt, whose latest novel, The Sisters Brothers, received a starred review from Publishers Weekly: “DeWitt has produced a genre- bending frontier saga that is exciting, funny, and, perhaps unexpectedly, moving.”

***

The Rumpus: I love your new book. It’s a picaresque romp in the old west: gun slingers, saloons, the gold rush. What led you as a writer to this terrain, especially since your first novel, Ablutions, was set in new millennial Hollywood? Was it a conscious choice to veer to an entirely different milieu?

Patrick DeWitt: It was very much a conscious decision to veer from the first book, not so much the contemporary setting as the shit-wallowing subject matter. I wanted the sophomore effort to be free from specific personal experience, but I needed to maintain a personal connection to the story and characters, because that’s what made Ablutions engaging for me to work on. I came to the time period–1851–more or less by accident. The Sisters Brothers started out as an exercise, basically, that continued to grow, and my interest in it grew also; at some point I realized I was working on my next novel, and that it was a western, and there wasn’t a thing in the world I could do about it.

Rumpus: I really like the idea that as writers our material tells us what it wants to evolve into: we listen to the words, rather than steering them (hopefully). What was the writing exercise that launched the project and since so many Rumpus readers are aspiring writers, would you recommend this tactic as a way to turn your imagination loose on the page?

DeWitt: Exercise might not be the correct word. But it occurred to me that the garden-variety neurotic is underrepresented in historical novels and movies, specifically westerns, not because he didn’t exist, but because he was/is considered an uninteresting or ignoble person to focus on. With that in mind, I wrote a testy exchange between two men riding side-by-side on horseback. One of them was self-doubting and vulnerable, while the other was confident to a fault. The scenario ballooned and exhausted itself and I set it aside. Later I found a book about the Gold Rush at a yard sale, and in flipping through this I was reminded of the two men. I picked the piece back up and the larger story began to take shape

Rumpus: “The garden-variety neurotic”: I tell my students that anybody can make a compelling character on the page if the writer does her job right to really inhabit that foreign set of perceptions. What were the struggles trying to get to know a neurotic, to make him charismaticin scene? And how far into the process did you make the determination that having them be brothers would be beneficial to the narrative?

DeWitt: I think everyone is neurotic to some degree, or can relate to the neurotic’s fears, however distantly. Speaking personally, it wasn’t all that much of a stretch to get into the narrator’s head in this way. The question of making him charismatic was something else altogether. I had to ask myself what I find appealing in others (frankness, self-deprecation, curiosity, morbidity) and then try to blend these traits into the narrative voice. Realizing Eli and Charlie were brothers happened at around the thirty or forty page mark. On the one hand it was aggravating to have to go back and rewrite them as siblings, but really, this is where the book took off for me.

Rumpus: Well, you did a fantastic job, not only making the narrator, Eli, a fully realized character, but the brother, Charlie, is equally as fun to spend time with. They are hilarious, and the novel’s dialogue absolutely crackles. You write some of the best dialogue out there right now. Is that all revision? Where/when do you know how to pick the right words for your characters to speak? And any advice for writing successful dialogue?

DeWitt: I do tend to read dialogue aloud, more so than any other parts–to act the conversations out a little. I mean, I’m not stomping around the room and changing outfits, but I try and actually imagine the scenarios. If I’m having trouble putting words in a character’s mouth, nine out of ten times it’s because I don’t know who the character is. I just started this new thing last week and the narrator’s really foggy–funny one minute, melancholy the next. He’s a wealthy businessman, and I’ve never known any wealthy businessmen. What’s his private vocabulary? Is he eloquent, or brash? Does he curse? What are his interests? I haven’t figured it out yet. When I do, I’ll go back to the start and re-write the parts where his isn’t acting like himself.

Rumpus: Revision can be so idiosyncratic from author to author, what’s your specific process?

DeWitt: If I’m working end to end on a completed draft, it’s textbook slash-and-burn carnage, followed by a period of buffing with a shammy, repeated until I’m truly lost, and don’t even know what I’m looking at any more. At this point I go to my trusted readers, and by gauging their reactions I’ll know one of three things has come to pass: 1) I’m done 2) I’m not done 3) I’ve totally messed up and written something the world must never see.

Rumpus: Your novel is very scene-oriented, very cinematic, almost a kind of neo-Spaghetti Western. Was that a conscious decision to pace it in that manner or was that how the story wanted to be told?

DeWitt: No, not really. I did notice, when it came to the formatting/typesetting stage that most of the sections are under five pages, which I think keeps things moving at a good clip. But I wasn’t doing this consciously.

Rumpus: Structurally, you do something in this novel that I’ve never seen before: there are a couple “Intermissions” scattered throughout the action. I was wondering why you decided to use this tack, and also how you determined which chapters were “intermission-worthy.” Did those sections have different “rules” that you set up for yourself?

DeWitt: I can’t remember the original motivation. I think I was trying to amuse myself, which is always dangerous. But those two sections deal with a supernatural element in the shape of a not very nice little girl who may or may not be a seer. I actually suggested to my editor at Ecco that we cut the intermission titles. But she pointed out, correctly, that without the titles those parts were jarring in that they seemed to come out of left field. They’re more effective when the reader knows they aren’t a part of the immediate story.

Rumpus: Setting is an important part of this book. Gold Rush San Francisco is such a vibrant, raucous place. How did you research that era? And more importantly, how did you write a book that didn’t draw attention to its research? Didn’t pummel the reader with peripheral facts?

DeWitt: I wrote a book that didn’t draw attention to its research by not doing very much research in the first place. I looked things up as I needed them, but scouring around for facts is not my idea of a good time. One thing I did do, which probably doesn’t pass for research, is that I used old photographs as prompts. This is how the character of Hermann Kermit Warm came about. I cut out a picture of a prospector from the yard sale book I mentioned earlier, tacked this to the wall in my office, and made up a person based on the image. Anyway, my not having firsthand experience of what I was writing about wasn’t that much of a handicap because character and personality took precedence over setting detail from the start.

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While reading Joshua Mohr’s second novel, Termite Parade, I kept thinking—for reasons that are now apparent to me—of a scene from the film version of The African Queen in which missionary Rose Sayer, played by Katherine Hepburn, admonishes the hard-living Charlie Allnut for his amoral, gin-drinking ways. By way of explanation, Allnut, played by Humphrey Bogart, says matter-of-factly that his behavior is “only human nature.” Hepburn counters, “Nature, Mr. Allnut, is what we are put in the world to rise above.” Soon after, in the wilds of East Africa, Hepburn goes slumming, and she and Bogey use their boat to score a small victory for the Allies.

Although no Germans are defeated in Mohr’s fiction, there are destructive natures to overcome and plenty of drinking and sordid behavior to compensate for the absence of military heroics. His first novel, Some Things That Meant the World to Me, was nothing if not a well-told tale of redemption with chimerical elements. In that strange tale, the primary wayward boozer—a man who had named himself Rhonda—suffered from the mental affliction depersonalization, and his bizarre fantasy world included a child named Little Rhonda who led the protagonist through the bottom of a Dumpster to a place that offered insight into painful childhood memories. Like many readers, I’d have little patience for a novel in which the real-world action consists solely of sodden misanthropes mining personal failure for an elusive shot at… something. But Some Things was more than that. It also didn’t hurt that Little Rhonda was an entertaining, comical character and that Mohr’s energetic, almost frenetic prose grabbed readers by the shirt and didn’t let go—as it does once again in Termite Parade.

Mohr works a similarly vulgar milieu here, with reprobate characters who aspire to abandon their animalism—present-day Bukowskis with heart—although this time around his explorations of decency, guilt, and redemption are a soberer take. The novel features three main characters: Derek, a San Francisco auto mechanic—self-aware, abuser of alcohol, willing but unable to change; Mired, Derek’s drunken and conflicted girlfriend, who describes herself as “the bastard daughter of a ménage a trois between Fyodor Dostoevsky, Sylvia Plath, and Eyeore”; and Frank, Derek’s twin brother, an equally-damaged provocateur and aspiring avant-garde filmmaker who has settled reluctantly into a career making corporate videos. The story centers on a violent incident between Derek and Mired, which Mired, the blacked-out victim, barely recalls, though Frank knows the grisly truth about Derek’s actions. Derek’s conscience, Mired’s hazy memories, and Frank’s threat to reveal the facts propel the action, as Mohr rotates the point of view to tell the story in alternating chapters of first-person narration.

Joshua Mohr

Frank’s plan for personal artistic glory hinges on “The Unveiled Animal,” a new kind of cinema that he says must evolve beyond “actors, scripts, contrived scenes and happy endings” to achieve “a convergence between mainstream filmmaking and documentaries.” In other words, Frank, a grown-up still speaking the language of a second-year film student, wants to create what seems to be an offshoot of cinéma vérité, or perhaps reality television. Eventually, his Unveiled Animal project dovetails with Derek and Mired’s tawdry conflict, just as Derek, returning from a brief escape to Reno, confesses his sins to his beloved. Mohr stages this important scene as a spectacle, an absurdity; if I were to recount the action—and I don’t want to give it away—my description might seem ludicrous. And yet the scene succeeds, reinforcing the impression of Mohr as a writer who keeps readers engaged and entertained, delivering what they might doubt, mid-story, is possible.

Still, Termite Parade’s occasional flaws are not insignificant: scenes that skirt dangerously close to the mawkish, a build-up to Derek’s penultimate confession that seems repetitive at times, sentimental attempts to elicit empathy for the characters. Mohr clearly hopes readers will root for them to become better people—even the reprehensible Derek, who near the end of the novel begrudgingly accepts Frank’s brainless theory that “there’s only one kind of person,” while trying to convince Mired that we’re just animals after all (echoing Charlie Allnut in The African Queen). But Mired will have none of it. “Derek was wrong and so was his deranged brother, who I was nothing like,” she tells the reader. “We weren’t all the same, weren’t animals. We were humans and we could learn. We could figure things out, if you gave us enough time.”

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This week, Rumpus Books reviewed a short story collection, published two terrific essays, and featured a really fascinating interview from The Rumpus International Rivers Interview series.

A review of Where the God of Love Hangs Out, a short story collection by Amy Bloom.

A review of Usher, a poetry collection by B.H. Fairchild.

Steve Almond responds to Katie Roiphe’s piece in The New York Times Book Review about men who are afraid of writing sex in Katie Roiphe’s Big Cock Block.

Joshua Mohr asks, “Why does peer review suddenly feel like a total violation?”

An interview with Dubravka Ugresic.

And be sure not to miss Andrew Porter’s Lask Book I Loved, The Dead Fish Museum.

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The Chicago Tribune calls Joe Meno “an unmistakably American author.” Meno’s new novel, The Great Perhaps, looks at an unmistakably American family, the Caspers, with all their anxieties, ambiguities, and doomed attempts to find simple answers to complex questions. Equal parts sad and funny, The Great Perhaps manages to weave the 2004 election, the Iraq War, and even World War II into a topsy-turvy story of the Caspers’ attempts to hold themselves together. Meno is the author of four previous novels, including Hairstyles of the Damned (2004) and two collections of short stories, including the illustrated volume Demons in the Spring (2008). He and Rumpus writer Joshua Mohr (Some Things that Meant the World to Me) recently read together at Powell’s City of Books in Portland, OR. Beforehand, they had dinner and talked about Meno’s work.

**

Rumpus: I just heard David Sedaris is reading across town at the same time as we are. Pre-sold 700 tickets, or something viciously ridiculous like that. Do you think anyone will come to our reading?

Meno: The formula that I use is that you want to have one person in the audience for every hour you traveled to get here. You drove?

Rumpus: Recklessly. About ten hours.

Meno: I flew two hours. All we need are twelve people.

Rumpus: It’s thrilling that the bar is set so low. Maybe we should have a kissing booth. That’ll pack ‘em in. How long did you work on The Great Perhaps?

Meno: I started it a couple weeks after the 2004 election. Really, the book was a way for me to ask the question why had the country made the decision it had, in reelecting George Bush. And also how that administration was defined by fear, using fear to push forward their agenda.

Rumpus: I was curious about your decision to write in the present tense. Did that happen in the revision process or in the book’s conception?

Meno: I was writing in 2004 and it was 2004…

Rumpus: That saves miles on the ol’ time machine.

Meno: It was weeks after the election. Even though I knew [the book] was going to come out a couple years later, the conflict and drama of those characters was connected to that one specific moment, the weeks leading up to the election. Ultimately, it’s about a fear of complexity. The different family members have a fear of a world that’s become too complex for them. They’ve gone to some simple answer or oversimplification.

Rumpus: I can empathize. So does the word “Perhaps” in the title echo each character’s interpretation of fear?

Meno: You got it. To me the most beautiful things are the things you’re still trying to figure out. We need complexity. The thing we were most missing in the weeks leading up to the invasion in Iraq was any kind of complex discussion. Instead we were arguing the merits of war through bumper stickers or CNN newsbytes. It wasn’t a right or left thing. It was an oversimplification of a really complex idea.

Rumpus: And a blaring deception, or series of deceptions.

Meno: Exactly. And the reason the deception worked was because people were in a complete state of panic. One of the reasons the Republicans were successful was because George Bush was able to pronounce his ideas in three or four word sentences.

Rumpus: I don’t think he had any other options.

Meno: But it worked. John Kerry had these very rational arguments that went on for paragraphs.

Rumpus: He bored his target audience.

Meno: Exactly.

Rumpus: A lot of male writers shy away from the idea of having to manufacture even one teenage female’s psychology on the page. You just went for it, though, and have two in this book. What was that experience like?

Meno: One character, Thisbe, I used her in a short story, someone searching for God. Then in a play, but it didn’t really work. I thought she was interesting. To me, characters always start with a question. For Thisbe [the younger of the two teenage girls in The Great Perhaps], it’s, “What’s so attractive about evangelical Christianity? Or any kind of fundamentalist religion?” It’s that the answers are already there for you, and there’s something comforting in that. Ultimately, what she’s really looking for is love.

Rumpus: This idea of starting with a question: I don’t think novels should answer the questions they posit, but instead should lead to new questions. It’s not the writer’s job to decrypt narrative.

Meno: Yeah. These characters found some resolution, but clearly they still have other lives to lead. Lives with more questions. The question is more interesting than the answer. All these characters rely really heavily on having a simple answer. Hopefully by the end of the book, they come to realize the question is the thing they should be devoted to. And that’s the book’s title. That’s the whole idea of it. Can you get rid of fear by adding a different threat?

Rumpus: Can you preempt chaos with more chaos?

Meno: Exactly.

Rumpus: Don’t give away too much. We’re trying to sell books for you here. One of the things I love about novels—and this seems like a paradox—is that only through the individual, the character, can a writer make a greater statement about humankind.

Meno: It’s got to go back to character.

Rumpus: So is each character in The Great Perhaps making a different social commentary, or just illuminating a different view on the prism of life?

Meno: That’s a great question.

Rumpus: I was pretty proud of myself when I scribbled that bad boy.

Meno: Each of the five family members has oversimplified everything in their life down to one thing—for Jonathan [the father] it’s the squid; for Madeline [the mother] it’s this cloud person she becomes obsessed with; for the [older] daughter Amelia it’s this bomb; for the other daughter [Thisbe] she becomes infatuated with a girl; for Henry [paternal grandfather] it’s the idea of escaping. That one single thing will save them. When actually, you need all of those. You need science, religion, politics, and history. It works like a prism, exactly like that.

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• Joshua Mohr Reads From Damascus
• On Civil Society
• Damascus Giveaway! (Is Now Over)
• The Rumpus Original Combo with Joshua Mohr

Also, an interview about Superman and BDSM and an essay about India and cancer.

Down in the Dumpster — A review of Some Things That Meant the World to Me by Joshua Mohr.

All That Glitters — A review of The Jump Artist by Austin Ratner.

The Lightness of Sidney Wade — A review of all the poet’s work, especially Stroke.

Losing Mum and Pup, A Liberal’s Guilty Pleasure — A review of Christopher Buckley’s new book about his conservative socialite parents. 

Also, don’t miss the Rumpus interview with Craig Yoe about Superman artist Joe Shuster’s BDSM art and Katherine Russell’s essay about India and cancer.

Related Posts:

• The Rumpus Interview with Craig Yoe
• Joshua Mohr Reads From Damascus
• Damascus Giveaway! (Is Now Over)
• The Rumpus Original Combo with Joshua Mohr
• Wayward In The Light

by Joshua Mohr

Lately people have been asking me why I decided to publish my novel, Some Things that Meant the World to Me, with a small press. Instinctively, my gut wants to lie, stammer some kind of self-justification: “Well, uh, I felt that a boutique house (note that I didn’t say “small press”) would give me more attention (i.e. answer my emails) and nurture the book in a way true to my artistic vision (i.e. not perform fellatio on the marketing department)

in a manner a larger house might not be willing to do (e.g. my book dies on the vine while they hype their latest cookbook or tell-all memoir by a fallen debutante who smoked crystal meth and wrecked her Bentley but lived to tell the tale…).”

When people ask me about my “decision,” I want to say something that makes me sound too enlightened to peddle my subversive and cerebral material to the fatcats who run the major publishing houses. But I’m not that enlightened person at all. I am the very guy who tried desperately to peddle his subversive (Really?) and cerebral (Didn’t you go to a state college?) material to the fatcats. They shunned me, not vice versa.

I finished my first novel and got a swanky agent in New York. She did her very best to sell the book (I have no idea if she did her very best, though I assume so), but the fatcats told her, “This book is too grim. It’s not viable in the market place.” They weren’t looking for cerebral and subversive—they were looking for the Next Bestselling Voice!, someone like Jonathan Safran Foer. (I’m sure he’s a nice guy.)

This is by no means a criticism of authors who have published with major houses. I’m not insinuating that they’ve sacrificed their integrity. Far from it—some of my favorite books have had the stamp of the fatcat. This is an indictment of the major publishing houses’ attempts to superimpose templates of success onto literary fiction, judging the marketability of next year’s titles on the successes and failures of last year’s.

As my novel made its way around Manhattan, more than one editor said she liked the book, but had to “pitch it to the marketing people.” These pitches never seemed to go my way. Eighteen houses shot the book down. The swanky Manhattan agent basically fired me: “Why don’t you write a second book and we’ll try again?” she said.

I was back in square one, except now square one had the stink of failure. And I had no idea what to do.

Good times (not good times)…

I got a new agent, and she sent the book to Two Dollar Radio, an independent publishing house that saw promise and merit in the story I was trying to tell. They are the subversive and cerebral ones, the brave souls who publish literary fiction and only literary fiction. There are no cookbooks or debutante tell-alls on their list. It’s literature for the love of language and story, rather than commercial viability.

My experience finding a publisher was horrible and gut-wrenching. (Whiskey helped.) It was also incredibly confusing because I didn’t know whose opinion to trust. I began referring to it as my “faithful grope in the dark.” I knew I needed a publisher. I knew an agent acted as a liaison between writer and publisher. What I didn’t know was what editors were looking for. Only later did it occur to me that maybe agents and editors are faithfully groping themselves.

I talked with an agent and an editor to hear whether my suspicion was right: Is the whole shebang run on hunches, “informed” inferences, projections based on ambiguous past experiences?

“How do you know what will sell?” I asked one prominent agent.

“You find a book you believe in, make an educated guess, and hope for the best.”

I tried to sound calm, professional, but I think my voice cracked: “Hope for the best?”

“There are too many variables to predict with any kind of accuracy,” she said. “There are editors, acquisition boards, marketing and sales teams, the art department, then the buyers. And that isn’t even factoring in trends or positive reviews or competition. Anyone who thinks they have an answer is lying.”

I then spoke with a former editor at several major publishing houses and asked how she knew what would sell.

“It’s a crapshoot,” she said. Her tone wasn’t smug or ambivalent; the calm way she conveyed this sentiment made it feel honest.

Turns out, chance is a brutal part of the publishing trade. Good books sometimes vanish without a trace, and obvious, dumbed-down books with clever marketing tricks often become successful. It’s a savage reality of the business, one writers need to be aware of.

What I heard from these publishing insiders confirms my suspicion that writers and agents and editors are all faithfully groping in the dark. There’s no such thing as a template of success. It’s impossible. There are too many stodgy people in publishing who look to replicate past successes rather than find new and unexpected ones, to capitalize on trends rather than create them. There’s an almost singular reliance on authors who have already sold well, shoving their new work down consumers’ throats regardless of its quality. What’s left for first-time or mid-list writers with better books but no reputation?

Again, I asked the swanky agent and editor.

“There’s a diaspora of emerging writers to the smaller houses,” the agent said. “The money just isn’t there for unknowns in the current market. There are exceptions, of course. But overall…”

My ulcer tapped-dance as I phoned the editor.

She said independent houses might be better for first-time or mid-list authors, because in a smaller catalog their book will get more attention. Indie houses may have better guerilla marketing strategies for 21^st century technologies. Maybe most importantly, the sales projections at smaller houses are more modest, and a book won’t be considered a failure if it sells 6,000 copies.

“Will this be good for literature?” the editor asked. “It’s too soon to tell.”

Joshua Mohr - the Faithful Groper

Fair enough. It probably is too soon. But for me, this information is all I need to solidify a couple things, make a couple decisions. One, since they’ve corroborated that the publishing business is run on chance, I need only concern myself with one thing: the quality of my writing. That isn’t chance at all. I can’t control marketing trends or debutantes, but I can control the amount of energy I put into my revision process. I can take my time and make sure to write the best book I can.

Two, I’ve decided to publish my second novel, From a Fragile Galaxy, with Two Dollar Radio as well, next year. Assuming the “crapshoot” model is true, I see no reason to leave. I don’t want to be a free agent out to make as much money as I can, I want to publish my books somewhere that editors, not marketing people, make the decisions. 2DR has proven itself interested in my aesthetic. They’ve built me a website and booked a reading tour. They’re receptive to my ideas. They—not to sound sentimental—care. Books aren’t just commodities to them. Books are art.

At least I know that when my editors think a section of my writing needs tinkering, it isn’t because the marketers deem it “too grim.” I know that the problem is with me, the words I’ve chosen, the scenes I’ve constructed—and that’s a freedom every writer should enjoy, the freedom of knowing that their editor is more concerned with publishing the best possible novel than selling the most books. If you happen to sell a lot of books, that’s wonderful. We all want an audience. But for me the audience is only worth having if they’re reading the book I intended to write.

**

Joshua Mohr’s first novel, Some Things that Meant the World to Me, comes out next week.

Related Posts:

• Publishing Vocab
• Is Optimism About the Future of “Serious” Publishing Possible?
• First Agent
• “Publishing: Adapt or Die”
• “The Devil’s Checks Never Bounce”