At the end of 2011, as if to round out the year, someone named @criticmichiko joined Twitter and began posting scathing, pretentious reviews of household objects, pizza crusts, and baby names: “It is with frustration that the reader tries to affix the new Swiffer pad to the Swiffer base. The user’s manual is self-indulgent blather.” A parody aimed at the scathing, pretentious New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani, @criticmichiko now has nearly a thousand followers. After another account, @ActualNYTMK, joined Twitter and demanded that the parody take the account offline, and then proceeded to accuse @colsonwhitehead of masterminding the whole thing, the Twittersphere was too amused to care whether or not @ActualNYTMK was, indeed, the actual Michiko Kakutani or simply another parody account.

In an essay for the Los Angeles Review of Books published last weekend, novelist Matthew Specktor examined not only this specific phenomenon but its ramifications—the fruits of social networking itself. Our identities, with few exceptions, are filtered through this media: “On Twitter, or Facebook, we serve ourselves up in miscellaneous detail, presenting our epigrams and aphorisms and photographs, our urbane or intemperate responses to others… Consciously or otherwise, we stretch ourselves into flattering (even if, at times, deliberately ugly) postures: We spend time trying to curate, to use that buzzy term, ourselves. Or ‘selves.’” It’s this other “self” that interests Specktor, and he goes on to admit that, despite the extent to which we’ve taken it, it’s nothing new: “Je est un autre. Rimbaud’s notorious observation has become a prescription. Every last one of us has become someone else, at least one person, by now.” For an artist, there has always been un autre—the fragmentation of the person who calls herself an artist and the artist herself who creates the art. Art itself—even our most personal art—is filtered in a far more meticulous and intricate way than our 140-character epigrams. Art is the organization of the personal into the persona. The artist is as much our creation as the art itself.

Last year, MCB had the pleasure of reviewing Twin City treasure Sierra DeMulder’s first book of poetry, The Bones Below. As a multiple National Poetry Slam champion, The Bones Below was DeMulder’s first public foray into what for simplicity’s sake is called “page poetry,” and showed a startling understanding of the way the human heart fragments itself and negotiates its own internal distance. MCB implores MCB readers—if you haven’t done so—to order this book.

MCB would also like you to order DeMulder’s new book, New Shoes on a Dead Horse. While The Bones Below betrays a knowledge of quiet pain and desire, New Shoes is her exploration of Rimbaud’s autre, and, it should be said, is the work of a mature artist. Here we have the three levels of Sierra DeMulder: Sierra, “Sierra,” and—in the ancient muse sense of the word—The Genius. In the opening poem, “The Genius and the Soup Kitchen,” this muse offers the world to its followers: “Finally, he unplugged the Open sign. / He waited for it to cool before bending / the letters, forming new words / with electric yarn. // You Will Find Everything Here.” As the public invades, he’s burdened by questions. “Is there a God?” someone wonders. “Why doesn’t he return // my phone calls?” Readers familiar with DeMulder’s previous work will imagine the young artist herself extending an empty bowl toward the Genius, looking for answers before she starves to death.

As artists, we do everything we can to prevent that starving. In New Shoes, we see the juxtaposition of person and persona, and what it takes to negotiate survival. In “The Genius Performs Taxidermy,” we see this relationship at work: “He heaved // the Love onto the butcher’s block, / lifted its limp neck. He knew from the sloppy / twine stitches and the mismatched eyebrows that // this was not its first time dying.” In this sense, the poems that show the ache of relationships—“Your Son Has a Beautiful Voice,” “Love, Forgive Me,” “After We Break into My Apartment Because I Lost My Keys”—not only function as odes and elegies to love, but as the crumpled pages that feed the heart’s flame. Everything is here—a full understanding of a young life, or DeMulder’s own A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman. Not only is New Shoes the work of a mature artist, but it’s the chronicle of that artist’s maturity, that artist’s awakening. It’s not simply a book of poems, but a narrative in verse, told in different voices from the same throat: “She’s got too many mouths to feed // on that head of hers. She’s got / too many heads on that vase of a neck.” It’s this starvation, however, that keeps every artist going back to her soup kitchen, as well as the Genius who waits behind the counter. Let’s hope we’re hungry forever.

New Shoes on a Dead Horse is forthcoming from Write Bloody Publishing (now taking pre-orders). You can meet the poet, as well as admire her intensely, at her release party on January 29th at Honey in NE Minneapolis (205 East Hennepin Ave), hosted by Spencer Retelle and featuring John Jodzio, Kerry Alexander, and A Loud Heart with Guante and Claire Taubenhaus. Party starts at 7:00. Visit DeMulder’s website for more information.

Even as an unseasoned critic, MCB is aware of the pitfalls one faces when reviewing young and/or emerging writers. S/he is either rife with exciting potential, or emblematic (this is the exact word one uses) of his or her generation, or both. Tony Rauch, with his third collection, Eyeballs Growing All Over Me… Again, proves to be both, yet this isn’t a pitfall. Rauch is one of those authors for whom reviews like this are reserved—for whom they were formulated in the first place. His work is exciting, and his ability to inhabit his protagonists’ heads betrays a deep understanding of gens X and Y.

When MCB was young(er), MCB lived in a basement with a strange electrical system, and whenever MCB played the guitar there was a slight electric current on the strings. It was nothing you’d want to rest your naked wrist against, but to calloused fingertips it was devilishly thrilling. That’s what Rauch’s work is like—a teenage boy playing guitar with a slight shiver, because it’s a voice that needs to be heard, and a voice that one doesn’t expect to be so engaging. Except Eyeballs is more like that boy reflecting on his days of guitar playing, maybe ten or twenty years later, after he’s lived enough to inflate those days with meaning.

Because Rauch’s work is meaningful. He tries to hide it, describing the collection as “young adult fairy tale surreal fantasy action adventure sci-fi short stories.” You could almost fall for it, starting with “The Stench,” in which a man’s wife welcomes an enormous, foul-smelling beast into their home. Of course they would love and care for the beast, but the smell is overpowering. Following that, a neighborhood boy discovers a breeding ground for clones—and not just any clones, but clones of himself. Next, a robot rips the roof off a couple’s house. Even though these stories are one absurdity after another, it never grows old, and each one is something new. A collection like this could easily settle for that—entertaining surrealism—but encountering stories like “Activate the Mathias” indicates a more complex maturity, in which atoms

exist in two separate states—vibrating and not-vibrating. And that as they keep vibrating on and off, that time actually splits into two states—the vibrating state and the non-vibrating one. So each state is a possibility. Every moment is divided into two separate possibilities. We exist in one moment, and another version of ourselves exists in that other moment.

It’s this possibility that unlocks the book. When you get down to it, Rauch is obsessed with possibility. It seems the impetus for the entire collection—the proverbial What if?—and it’s in this underlying current on the guitar strings that one can truly enjoy this book.

Like many young protagonists of modern fiction, Rauch’s characters—mostly boys—aren’t easily swayed by external influences. A boy awakened in the night doesn’t seemed upset by the goblins threatening to disembowel him unless he hands over the Golden Eagle of Montenegro: “’It’s up your nose, you ugly goatsucker,’” he tells them. “’Now leave me alone.’” A boy who wakes up with eyeballs pushing their way through his skin—on his back, his chest, his arms, his thighs—simply puts on a turtleneck and rushes to catch the bus. “Other than the initial shock of the unusual discovery,” he says, “I actually felt pretty fine.” A teenager is accidentally sent back to the wrong time after aliens take him out to party, and upon encountering a younger version of himself in his bedroom he simply acts like an older brother. What Rauch gives us, over and over, is a world in which youth is so oversaturated by stimulus and pop culture that almost all affect has been rubbed out. MCB is tempted to call this nihilism, but doesn’t want to seem fashionable. It’s an emptiness that calls into question the younger generations’ capacity for understanding and empathy, but the catch is that lust for possibility—the fascination inherent in Rauch’s work itself. Eyeballs is a work of exploration. It is a hunger to seek out those other dimensions and learn something about oneself that is closed off in our normal world. Anyone with a sense of adventure and an existential curiosity will slip into the portal and explore the alternatives, one by one, and enjoy every moment of it.

Eyeballs Growing All Over Me… Again is available in store at Magers & Quinn, or online from Common Good Books, Wild Rumpus, and The Red Balloon Bookshop. Visit his website or friend him on Facebook.

Get In (To this Launch Party) If You Want to Live
Honey, NE Minneapolis
Saturday, October 15, 2011

Chances are, if you’re aware of MCB, you’re aware of the local literary magazine Paper Darts. It therefore goes without saying that their foray into a full publishing press, gorgeous first book, and resulting launch party will also be familiar to you. However, one must acknowledge the possibility—as remote as it may be—that an MCB reader, though familiar with MCB, has never heard of Paper Darts. Why anyone would wish to imagine such a scenario is better left to the creative machinations of Stephen King or Nicholas Sparks. MCB, for one, cannot live in such a world. The aforementioned foray, book, and party are inarguable reasons for MCB readers to agree.

Several months ago, the three headed octopus down in the belly of Paper Darts pushing all the buttons and wrapping its tentacles around all the levers announced that the magazine would be publishing their first book, joining the ranks of Graywolf Press, Coffee House Press, Milkweed Editions, and other local publishing houses. That book would be local author John Jodzio’s second short story collection, Get In If You Want to Live. On Saturday night, dreams of both mollusk and man came true while over a hundred people huddled down together at Honey in Northeast Minneapolis to drink, support local artists, and laugh until their diaphragms protested as Jodzio read from his new collection.

A word on the book.

Readers unfamiliar with John Jodzio must imagine a dashing, boyish man who might steal your drink when you’re not looking—or, if we’re to connect author and art, while you’re staring right at it. His feel for the disconnected and the derelict elicits envy in the most adamant of self-proclaimed nihilists: he knows how to be dark. That’s not to say the stories in Get In are heavy or draining—they’re anything but. Not only does a room full of drunk people quake with laughter while Jodzio reads with his careful, fixed irreverence, but you—alone in your apartment—laugh aloud at each new absurdity. You laugh because Jodzio knows how to be dark. You laugh because there’s no other way to process these narrators pushed to the extremes of depravity, like the drug dealer who won’t hesitate to electrocute your nuts or the friendly neighbor who makes chili for one marvelous reason: “Hookers love my chili so much that they usually thank me for it with sex on my kitchen floor or in my broom closet.” You laugh because you have to.

Jodzio’s work hinges on the juxtaposition of societal norms and deviant extremes. In the title story, a survivor of the zombie apocalypse is approached by a man who claims he can save her. The catch, of course, is that she’s just as flippant and self-involved as she might have been with a frat boy at a campus bar: “If you are trying to hook up with this sweet piece of post-apocalyptic ass, you’re gonna need to try way harder than that, mister.” In a reverse scenario, the story “Javier”—which MCB would argue is the best story in the collection—recounts a man so lonely and out of touch that he manipulates his pet wolf into murdering his crush’s boyfriend. “This is Jake’s head, right?” he asks Javier. With this lens of absurdity, Jodzio encapsulates a generation—all of us who are isolated, emotionally inarticulate, and afraid of making anyone else uncomfortable. These stories are all electric with humor, but at the core of each is a sadness that you’d have to be illiterate to ignore, and it makes the collection not only complex but perfectly human, not to mention beautiful.

What the three headed octopus of Paper Darts has brought to the collection is its own special signature. Each story is paired with a local, national, or international artist. The result is a gorgeous and eccentric book that is unusual in every way¹. If John Jodzio reminds us of the pitfalls of being human, Paper Darts reminds us of the ecstasies of literature in print. There’s nothing like it, and there never will be. Revel in it while you can.

Get In If You Want to Live is currently available at Magers & Quinn, or direct from PaperDarts.org. To persuade yourself, visit John Jodzio’s website at: http://www.johnjodzio.net/.

***
1: MCB would like to stress that this is a good thing—a great thing—a wonderful, amazing thing.

MCB has a friend. Joel is a good name. Joel had always been interested in writing, going so far as to write “novels” when he was in fourth grade. When Joel graduated high school and enrolled at the University of Minnesota, he spasmed at the opportunity to take Intro to Creative Writing—a course with a unique structure. Instead of the standard professor lecture/TA discussion dynamic, the Intro to Creative Writing Course at the University of Minnesota is structured as a series of guest lectures. Local and national writers are invited to read their work, share their creative process, and answer questions. Joel was lucky, in that regard: access to all these writers so early in his career was invaluable, not to mention extraordinary.

Joel skipped class a lot. He deeply, deeply regrets it. MCB has confirmed this.

MCB hopes the students at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design are not so dismissive and unappreciative of these opportunities. MCB hopes that the students in attendance at Craig Thompson’s discussion of Habibi on Monday night soaked up everything that Thompson spilled over them. The reason for this is simple: Craig Thompson is a genius.

“Whenever I finish a book,” Thompson said to an overflowing audience¹, “I’m sick of what I’m drawing.” This is what started Habibi—the graphic novel he began after the publication of his award-winning Blankets, an autobiographical account of first love and teenage repression. This desire “to move onto something bigger and outside of myself” gave way to the long (seven year), arduous (agonizing) task of writing Habibi—an epic that tells the story of two refugee child slaves whose lives are intertwined.

Habibi has been hailed by The Guardian as “an orgy of art for its own sake.” Like Thompson’s previous work, this novel is revolutionary. Thompson’s attention to detail is taken to a new level. It’s that attention to detail that harkens back to MCB’s statement that so far has gone unchallenged².

It’s that seven year, agonizing process that Thompson discussed on Monday night—a topic that any hopeful graphic novelist or art student of any kind could not afford to miss. Thompson showed us his sketchbooks, pages of thumbnail sketches, his “secret” notes that are so poorly drawn that he admitted embarrassment as we drooled over them. “Comics are calligraphy,” he said, giving us a glimpse into his artistic philosophy. “I don’t see them as typography.” Calligraphy is one of the greatest design inspirations for Habibi. Several spreads in the book feature Arabic calligraphy worked into the background. MCB’s favorite moment—and the moment Thompson’s genius was made undeniable—was when Thompson showed the audience a poem in Arabic. This poem—on the surface about rain but between the lines about the loss of the speaker’s mother—was already beautiful, but after Thompson cut it up, overlaid it in the background of two characters embracing, and mixed it with raindrops—to clarify: the poem, the Arabic calligraphy, became rain—it was startling.

MCB would like to telescope out for a moment. We’ve called Thompson a genius. The word is often used—perhaps overused—but how exactly would we define it, in an artistic sense? The dictionary, always inept in these situations, suggests “somebody with outstanding talent.” Outstanding talent is all over the place. In a city like Minneapolis you can’t get away from it. MCB would like to suggest that genius is a specific kind of talent—an ability to synthesize and distill simultaneously, to weave multiple seemingly unrelated threads into one structure, to—as Thompson puts it—“tell a bunch of lies to arrive at the truth.” Into Habibi, Thompson put spirituality and human degradation, high art and low design, multiple cultures (including one of which he knew almost nothing when he started), the subtleties of a language he doesn’t speak, patterns and symbols that disappear into the background, and a quiet system of mathematics based on Arabic numerical philosophy. The result, according to The Guardian, is a visual feast. We can only hope the students in the room—outnumbering the rest of us four to one—took something home. “You have to keep breaking your heart if you want it to open,” Thompson said, echoing Rumi. Here he laid bare his creative process to show us that heart and its refusal to open—stubborn until the end when it finally, gently, announced a masterpiece. We can all of us—even those of us who aren’t students—learn something from him. In fact we did.

Habibi is now available at your local independent book store. Visit Thompson’s blog at http://www.dootdootgarden.com/.

***
1: Not only was the auditorium full, but the overflow room—into which was beamed a live feed of Thompson’s presentation—was full.

2: “Craig Thompson is a genius.” More on this later.

In a startling move toward intimacy, the lights are dimmed in the Loft’s auditorium. Fourteen or fifteen chairs are brought up to the front of the room. MPR reporter Marianne Combs folds her hands and looks over her notes—a legal pad with script running edge to edge. Granta Magazine, she is saying, has the reputation of being one of the premier literary magazines not only in this country but in the world. It’s from Combs that we—the audience—learn that writers such as Bill Bryson, Zadie Smith, and Arundhati Roy have landed their debut pieces in Granta, which only highlights the magazine’s ability to seek out spectacular new talent. They call themselves “the quarterly magazine,” the assertiveness of which—let’s call it assertiveness—is more charming than it is malevolent.

“I love Granta,” says the stately bookseller representing Magers & Quinn, gesturing to the copies spread out on the table in front of him. “It’s where I’ve been introduced to a lot of writers, where I read them first.” He picks up a custom hole-punch. “Do you have your LitPunch card?”

Last Thursday’s Minneapolis Granta Launch, much to MCB’s surprise, didn’t draw a large crowd. Instead, much to MCB’s pleasure, it morphed from a presentation on life and literature post-9/11 to an open discussion with members of the audience. Here we are, in a semi-circle around the table at the front of the room, holding our newly purchased copies of Granta 116, passing around a pitcher of water provided by the perpetually generous Loft staff. Combs, barely looking at her notes, introduces the panelists: Marlon James, professor of creative writing at McAllister College and author of the award-winning novel, The Book of Night Women; Susan Power, author and member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe; and Barbara Frey, human rights professor and activist. What ensues is an impromptu, unrehearsed examination of the way 9/11 has left its mark on our nation and the world.

Power goes first, reading her personal essay on 9/11, “Sacred Ground.” She has a premonition toward the end of August, 2001, where men will set out to bring our “complete economic collapse.” Days later, we are attacked. Her grandfather appears to her, on his face unmistakable sadness but also “radiant peace.” We must mourn the dead, she understands—we must acknowledge the extent of this tragedy—but it is not the only tragedy that has happened, and to let it change our culture would be a grievous mistake.

The first class he taught in Minnesota, James announces, was “9/11 and the Novel.” Here Combs gives him a look, almost like she’s in shock, like she’s just found a hundred dollar bill in the street. “9/11 still doesn’t seem very real,” says James. “It’s still a present tense event,” meaning that it’s still fresh in our minds. It still “just happened.” James gives us the image of an unmoored country, de-centered, pushed off track. He reads excerpts from Elliott Woods’s essay, “Veterans of a Foreign War,” which reminds us that the major wreckage of 9/11 is thousands of miles away. Even if you live in New York the only thing you see is an absence—a lack of presence. Here we understand the collective guilt of our country, even our soldiers. “You have people wondering,” says James, “have we suffered enough?” 9/11 still surprises us on September 11th of each consecutive year. Until then we compartmentalize it. We put it aside until it becomes omnipresent and we’re forced to face it head on and remember everything it did to us—the first time in recent history that the United States was forced to choose between freedom and protection, an idea that to most of us is wholly foreign.

That’s the absurd thing, says Frey about the compartmentalization. She recounts a recent visit to a Wells Fargo ATM which, during her transaction, asked her to take a moment to reflect on the victims of 9/11. Here’s that American exceptionalism, she says—that notion that “we have suffered like no one has suffered before.” That’s the real tragedy, and the true crime of the Bush administration—this illusion that nothing like 9/11 had ever happened before and that we would get our revenge, that these three thousand people died but all we have to do is go out and spend money to keep the economy going, that we have to surrender—as James points out—our freedom in order to receive “protection,” which is later abused by the next figurehead in power.

The audience is mixed between the young and the middle aged. Mothers are concerned over how to tell their children about 9/11, how they can illustrate what the country was like before. Combs points out the sanitization of our culture, how we pretend that there is no violence, how everything is distanced from reality and compartmentalized, safeguarded. Twenty-somethings raise their hands and talk about where they were when the towers were struck, sitting in their eighth or eleventh grade classrooms. “Our teacher had to explain to us the severity of the situation,” one explains. “We didn’t really think it was real. Well, we thought it was real but we didn’t really get it. The way the teachers were reacting—that’s how we understood it.”

This is going to be the challenge, and the legacy, of 9/11—its different impact on each generation. Twenty-somethings grew up in the ‘90s, their consciousness of politics flowering post-Cold War when the United States was the unquestioned leader of the world. There were no threats. Enemies were nationless terrorists or inexplicably evil, rich villains. It was a time of almost unmatched prosperity with little to no adversity. We were the center of the world when we were growing up, and that’s why we shrugged our shoulders when those planes hit. It’s just a plane, we thought. They’ll put out the fire and fix those top floors of the building. When the other plane hit it still hadn’t sunk in. Then the first tower went down—this building we’d seen in countless movies, television shows, calendars, postcards, Internet jpegs, desktop backgrounds. We watched it collapse into a cloud of dust that bloomed up from the street and swallowed cars and little New Yorkers running in all directions. The World Trade Center was gone. Something had changed it and it wasn’t simply a matter of putting out the fire. It wasn’t the deaths that affected us. It wasn’t the image of the smoke reaching over into Brooklyn. It was the fact that someone could destroy a major landmark of American culture—this iconic building we’d grown up with—and even though we’d never been to New York we felt its absence, knew its significance, and, like James says, were completely unmoored. A generation of teenagers broke out of their shells on 9/11, and the next generation will grow up with this insecurity, this turmoil, and they won’t find it strange at all, the freedoms they’ve unknowingly surrendered.

“We have to wrap up the discussion,” Combs says, looking around as the Loft staff stacks their chairs and packs up the table of books out in the hallway. “But thank you for coming.”

We’ll be thinking about it, 9/11. There may be no great 9/11 novel. It may be, as James says, too “present,” but with these youth—these flowering writers—it’s only a matter of time.

Visit the Granta website at: http://www.granta.com, or follow them on Twitter: @GrantaMag. For more events at the Loft, or simply to be plugged into the Minneapolis literary scene, follow @loftliterary.

It’s because of this reputation that the mention of bookish New York has always struck a chord with the rest of the country, whether it be a chord of inspiration or a chord of aggravation. Not everyone wants to move to New York. Why, we wonder, should New York get all the glory? Sure it’s the locus of almost every major publisher and literary agent. Sure it’s where the majority of our nation’s top writers live. But is there really something intrinsic about New York that instills within writers some kind of literary spirit?

Tom Lutz of the Los Angeles Review of Books doesn’t think so. In a recent interview with the LAist, Lutz pointed out that because literature has become decentralized over the last several decades, so too should its urban foothold. “New York tends to think of the world of books as directed by the publishing industry,” Lutz said. “We”—meaning LARB—“are looking at the world of books as something directed by readers.” In the interview, Lutz proposed that the next great literary city would be Los Angeles—a city used to its own decentralization while still remaining a cultural center.

The LARB is an exciting publication. MCB would like to get that out there. You can learn more about it in the interview, as well as in a recent Poets & Writers essay by Jane Ciabattari. Where the LARB excels, Lutz said, is duplicating for their readers “the serendipitous experience of browsing in a book store, or in library stacks, the experience of bumping into interesting things they had no idea existed, that they wouldn’t have thought to search for.” It is one of the most refreshing things the literary sphere has seen over the last several years—something that looks in the eye of those wretched “books are dead” people and grins and shows them all the ways in which books have never been more exciting, nor the discourse they spark, nor the myriad ways in which we interact with them. A quick search on Twitter for “@LAReviewOfBooks” will show you countless tweets every day from people ecstatic about this publication. They’re here to stay.

But MCB is troubled. “There has been a dream in literary circles since the late 19th century of wrestling control of publishing from New York,” Lutz told the LAist. What happens when that control is wrestled away? If Los Angeles becomes the next great literary city, what exactly will have changed? Writers will simply have a new Mecca to dream about, a new fantasy life where there’s a book store on every corner and you can’t get a cup of coffee without running into a novelist or a playwright. Instead of traveling two thousand miles east to nurture one’s career, Midwestern hopefuls will travel two thousand miles west.

Things that make MCB suspicious:

• The greatest novel ever written
• The [industry] capital of the world
• “The Twin Cities’ largest book store!”
• Large companies that own several smaller companies
• “Voted Best Chai by Minneapolis Citypages!”

Proclaiming something as the best, the biggest, the number one—all of this tends to diminish everything that isn’t the best, that isn’t the biggest, that happens to fall anywhere from number two to number ninety-nine. The next literary revolution in LA shifts the focus, but that focus is still contracted to a pinpoint. Meanwhile the rest of the country is left in shadow, writers and book lovers clinging to their dwindling book stores.

Here’s what MCB proposes: Let there be no great literary city. Every city should be literary. While MCB realizes the slight impossibility of that statement, there’s no reason it shouldn’t be a goal. There’s something unique in every city—something that must be noticed and watched over. Everyone should experience the musty aisles of a used book store, not just the citizens of New York or Los Angeles. Every city should have its culture enriched by local writers, independently owned booksellers, and even a small press or two. With the bankruptcy of Borders, there are some cities in this country that recently lost their only book store. The only option left for the readers in those cities is the very centralized Amazon, which happens to be the largest bookseller in the world. We need to decentralize, as Lutz points out, but we need to do it in a way that gives every city literary merit. Otherwise we turn the literary experience into a privilege rather than a right.

Follow the LARB on Twitter. You won’t regret it.

Although it would certainly take all the frustration out of life if you really did grow up to be a firefighter or an astronaut or a dragon, it would also suck the surprise out of every moment. New York based author Caitlin Kelly was surprised, when the recession hit, to find herself making the unintentional and very unwanted switch from journalism to retail. After losing her job as a reporter for the New York Daily News, Kelly worked for 27 months at The North Face at an upscale mall in White Plains, NY. It was that surprise, however, that led to the crafting of a memoir. Malled: My Unintentional Career in Retail is Kelly’s account of what it means to make $11/hr at the age of 50—her first low wage job since high school—as well as an examination of the recession’s effect on the third largest industry in the United States, which is of course its largest source of new and less than desirable jobs. Kelly draws from her own experience as well as that of her peers to show us just how nightmarish the retail life can be. Entertainment Weekly called it “an excellent memoir” while USA Today declared Kelly “a first rate researcher and storyteller.”

Kelly will be reading from her memoir at Magers & Quinn on Thursday, August 11, at 7:30 p.m. MCB was able to get in touch with her and ask a few questions.

MCB: When you lost your job at the New York Daily News and you began working retail, how long did it take for the severity of the situation to set in? Did it feel a little surreal at first?

CK: You mean how rough retail can be? It was pretty quick! We opened in September or October and holiday shopping starts on Black Friday, right after Thanksgiving. People are crazy then, so we saw it soon enough. I’m not sure it was surreal in general. I knew it would be challenging. What I did find really hard to grasp was how nasty and entitled some shoppers are. I still don’t understand why they think this is acceptable but it’s very common—I’ve been getting plenty of email from retail workers, past and present, telling me (gratefully!) how accurate my portrayal of retail work is.

MCB: When did you get the idea for the memoir? Were you writing chapters in your head while cashiering or is this something that came much later?

CK: The minute I started there, several good friends who are journalists were utterly convinced there was a book in it. I was not at all persuaded myself. I did, just in case, take some detailed notes for the first few months (thank heaven!) but then stopped until June 2009—almost two years of no note-taking—when I met my agent. I absolutely was not writing in my head while doing it, for a few reasons. I was, from September 2009 to December 2009, when I quit, taking a lot of notes, every shift, capturing lots of physical details and dialogue I then knew for sure I would need. The rest would have to come, as it did, from my memories.

One of the things readers and authors who hope to tackle this sort of book need to know—you can’t write it as you go. It’s too raw, too fresh and too unprocessed. You need time to reflect and start to see patterns and themes in it all. It’s also, for me anyway, work that often evoked some pretty powerful emotions and I needed time and space to think more calmly about what to include, where and why. I researched and wrote the book between January and June 2010; I quit the job December 18, 2009.

In those six months, I hired two part-time researchers and read ten books on work, shopping, retails, malls and low-wage labor to better understand my subject, as well as conducting about 25 original interviews. So there was a fair bit of additional work. Malled is not just my story, but the much larger story of retail workers in many companies and of the industry in general.

MCB: About those interviews. Your book features spotlights on other professionals like yourself who were laid off from higher paying jobs and forced to work retail. Was there any sense, while you were working at North Face, that these people were out there?

CK: It seemed fairly obvious to me, as the recession got worse and worse and worse, there certainly had to be. One of the issues really hitting older workers is age discrimination—unemployed workers, white collar or not, over 45 or 50 have had a much rougher ride, for whatever reason. Once your severance or unemployment benefits run out and so do your savings (if you have any), you’ve got to make some cash! Some people will just go do whatever is necessary. I just had to go find them.

MCB: Did writing this memoir give you a sense of vindication after thewhole thing was over? Are you able to laugh about it yet?

CK: I’m not sure that’s the word. My goal was not to dis The North Face or retail, but to report what I found, saw, lived and heard from many other retail veterans. It’s deeply satisfying, as a journalist, to be able to really dig deeply into a story no one else had tackled in this way, so I loved that opportunity. It’s cathartic to tell some stories out of school, and those of my co-workers. I laughed about it even as I did the job. Had it not been for some great co-workers, I would never have lasted. We laughed a lot!

MCB: Was there anything you learned about working in customer service that you won’t soon forget? If so, how does that carry over into your rejuvenated profession?

CK: Shoppers need to clean up their act! Every retail worker working directly with the public too often is subjected to a kind of thuggishness that leaves them stunned and demoralized. I’m giving the closing keynote to a retail conference in Minneapolis and my goal is to remind senior executives what front-line workers face every single day. It’s very, very rough emotionally.

I now make a point, whenever and wherever possible, to thank all sorts of workers who do a terrific job for crummy wages. They work hard, and hard work deserves our respect.

***
A regular contributor to The New York Times since 1990, Kelly has written for USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Glamour, More, and other publications in Canada and Europe. A former reporter for the New York Daily News, Toronto Globe and Mail, and Montreal Gazette, she is the winner of a Canadian National Magazine Award (humor), and five journalism fellowships. Born and raised in Canada, she has lived in the U.S. since 1988, and has also lived in England, France and Mexico.

As mentioned above, Kelly will be reading at Magers & Quinn this Thursday, at 3038 Hennepin Avenue South in Minneapolis. For more information, visit the M&Q website.

More information on Malled can be found here: http://malledthebook.com/

Be sure to check out Kelly’s blog at http://broadsideblog.wordpress.com/

MCB has already established two facts about the Twin Cities:
• We’re home to an extraordinarily supportive network of writers and bookish types
• We happen to have one of the strongest queer literary scenes in the country

Today, MCB will solder together those two facts into one new fact: the Twin Cities GLBTQ Writer’s Group is there for you, you being a writer and you being some shade of queer¹.

Meeting every first Monday at 7:00 at the Loft Literary Center, the GLBTQ Writer’s Group started years ago as the Gay Men’s Writer’s Group. To include the rest of the queer community, or simply to eliminate the double possessive, the group expanded shortly after to welcome all those literary and understanding of life outside the heteronormative sphere². For two hours, attendees are encouraged to announce personal accomplishments, discuss local literary news, and share any projects they may be working on.

As far as writing groups go, this group leans toward the supportive rather than the critical. This isn’t one of those groups in which a writer is forbidden to speak while the other members tear his or her story to fleshy, pink pieces. That’s not to say, however, that sharing your work is a waste of time. The group always offers helpful feedback, be it something minor and specific like a line that doesn’t work (or works very well—let’s not forget the praise), or be it something more general and overarching like a story’s pacing and delivery. Attendees tend to run the gamut as far as style and skill level are concerned. Some writers show up and share their hope to start writing more often, to start taking their writing seriously, and others have been writing every day for the last five years. Some writers are halfway through a novel and are looking for helpful hints along the way. Others bring in a handful of poems every month.

One poet asks another: “Are you a revision kind of person?”

The poet shrugs and looks down at his notebook. “Mostly I just write and move on, but I like hearing feedback so I know what to work on for the next piece.”

The diversity of the group is exactly what makes it worth coming to every month. You never know who you’re going to meet, what they’re going to read, or what you’ll have to say about it. It’s a way for writers to keep themselves on their toes, to think critically on the spot and provide feedback in a constructive, supportive fashion, without putting your own personal tastes in the way. That’s how you know, really, that you’re part of a strong community of writers—you learn to anticipate what’s best for their writing, not necessarily what’s best for you.

The GLBTQ Writer’s Group will meet again in September, but of course it won’t be Labor Day. Facilitator Lucas Schulze will announce the date toward the end of August, at which time MCB will spread the word.

Follow the Loft Literary Center on Twitter for a continuous stream of helpful information (@loftliterary), or visit their website at http://www.loft.org.

***
1: MCB need not list all the variations of gender, sexuality, and identity. It’s highly unlikely that any person who has found this blog is unfamiliar with all that GLBTQ connotes. For discreet clarification or to simply kick off a colorful discussion, post an anonymous comment or tie a note to one of the city’s pigeons. MCB will find it.

2: MCB is tempted to say “picket fences and Prozac” but it would come across as confrontational, especially when MCB only means to apply this to the hostile sect of the heterosexual community. What MCB is trying to say is that allies are welcome to the group, if said allies have any particular interest in GLBTQ writing.

The focus, lately, has been community. Though really, when it comes to writers and the book-minded, does the subject ever stray from community? Again, as isolated as we are in our profession and our practices, we’re still very social creatures. We learned that with the talented Hazel and Wren. Today we are going to learn about another extension of the Twin Cities literary community: The MN Publishing Tweet Up.

MCB would like to say that it takes place on x Wednesday of the month, or every x weeks, but unfortunately this wonderful opportunity is still flicking its moistened wings to test out the weather. Regardless, the MN Publishing Tweet Up is a wonderful opportunity, and not only for writers, but for editors, publishers, agents, and just about everyone else who lives and dies by the book¹.

What is the Tweet Up? Where did it come from? MN Publishing co-founder Dawn Frederick explains:

There seemed to be missing an opportunity for writers and those in publishing to interact casually, outside of an overly planned or paid event. Very much like the Lit Pub Crawls in NYC, it seemed a great idea to have our own variation of this in the Twin Cities. Especially due to the many successful and newly established indie publishing houses here. Plus the NY publishing scene knows we have an incredible writing community – the MN Pub Tweet Up allows us to reflect this even more.

Here’s how it works:

Attendees arrive at the specified location (last Wednesday’s being Clubhouse Jäger), order a drink of their choice, head to the back of the bar, and take a nametag from the stack. About the nametag—it’s imperative, MCB has discovered. Without the nametag, nobody is going to look down at your chest and say “Ah, yes. I liked your tweet about [noun]. Very insightful.” On the nametag goes of course your name, your Twitter handle (if you have one), and—during Wednesday’s Tweet Up in particular—what book you’re currently reading. If you’re an attendee lucky enough to hail from a local literary presence, it wouldn’t hurt to put that, too, unless you want to go undercover.

The atmosphere is friendly. MCB would like to stress that—it’s incredibly friendly. Frederick is one of the most welcoming and extroverted personalities to have ever fallen in love with books—most of us being so awkward and introverted—and she makes an excellent host. Doubtless this fits into her philosophy regarding writers, editors, agents, and their complicated relationships:

I’ve experienced aspiring authors getting extremely nervous when in the presence of anyone who works in publishing. Seeming to forget we’re just like them, that the only difference we have is our roles in the publishing world. Someone needs to write the book, others need to make it happen. It’s that simple. Nothing worth getting overly worried or stressed about. The goal of the Tweet Up is to hopefully reflect that sentiment. To allow everyone to “come as they are” without necessarily worrying about the constraints of a formal interaction. And being able to discuss the new trends and challenges in publishing over a happy hour is always going to be a good experience, and less formal.

What’s more—the Tweet Up is not only meant for writers or those who work in publishing. According to Frederick, the only qualification for attending is to simply love books. “If publishing is going to survive the transitions
it’s currently going through,” she told MCB, “we all need to unite.”

Wednesday’s Tweet Up was only the third of its kind, the whole project still being very new. What hopes are there for the future?

We’d love to see this grow. The MN Pub Tweet Up would love to include more guest bloggers on our site, where publishing and books are discussed. There is also the possibility of us rotating Tweet Ups between St. Paul and Minneapolis. Even moving to a more organized setup with a speaker each time and lots of tweet “action” (very much like a Digital Book World event). For the moment, there are many ideas on the table on where we’d like to go. As long as the “come as you are” approach stays intact, we’re game for new ideas. Right now we’re planning the next one for this Fall (nothing is set in stone yet). Fingers crossed, I’m hoping it’ll be a something that will bring even more people.

The MN Publishing Tweet Up, so far, has seen anywhere from twelve to twenty attendees at a time. Again, the only requirement is a love of books, so there’s really nothing to stop you—if you’re reading this blog with “bibliophile” in its title—from keeping in touch with MN Publishing and pouncing on the next opportunity to meet these extraordinary people. In an hour, MCB talked about Philip Roth, debated the evils of Amazon, confessed utilization of a 1940s LC Smith typewriter for all first drafts, learned about Twitter platforms, and shook hands with a half dozen sweaty book lovers². It’s any bookish Minneapolitan’s dream.

For more information about the Tweet Up, visit the MN Publishing website at http://pubmn.com, or follow them on Twitter: @MN_Pub. If writers are interested in contributing to the MN Publishing blog, please contact Dawn Frederick or Eric Christopher through the MN Publishing website.

***
1: This is not an idiom, meaning the emphasis should be placed on book, not the phrase itself. MCB apologizes for the ambiguity. Official statement forthcoming.

2: This is not to say they were in some way depraved or abnormal; the room was at the back of the bar and refused to slip below 95º. The book lovers themselves were stellar people and were only sweating because there was no other way, you understand.

Most of us read the news. It doesn’t matter where we get it, as long as it’s news, even though when we say news what we really mean is updates. Here’s what’s changed about this war, here’s what hasn’t, here’s what you’re paying at the gas pump and here’s why, here’s what might lead to a new war, here’s why we’re too nihilistic to take war seriously these days.

One’s tempted to say we’d be better off not reading the news.

If you’re reading this editorial there’s a distinct probability that you love books. That, of course, would make you especially sensitive to the ignorance-is-bliss cliché. But there’s something wholly satisfying, for you, isn’t there, about reading?—about absorbing information in a very solitary way? You might even be passionate about books, a self described bibliophile. Books, you might say, are your life. “If you go home with someone and they don’t have books,” you might repeat to your friends, “don’t fuck them.”¹ You take this seriously because you feel there’s no other way to take it, because who wants to fuck someone incapable of appreciating one of the highest most delicate and in no small way spiritual forms of art?

That’s how you might phrase it, being so in love with books.

As a bibliophile, there’s a distinct possibility that you follow a specific kind of news. Of course you read about the wars and the oil and the nihilism—that’s inevitable—but peppered in with all that are book reviews, author interviews, pages of literary criticism, essays from the publishing soapbox. Not to mention the blogosphere. The literary world, as you call it—it’s an entirely self-contained and self-propagating journalistic engine with more articles than one book lover could possibly consume. That’s how you know that Haruki Murakami, Don DeLillo, and Jeffrey Eugenides all have books coming out this fall. That’s how you know that independent book stores across the country have been forced to charge patrons admission at certain literary events. That’s how you know that the majority of book buyers (not necessarily book lovers) purchase their books online, be they hardcover, paperback, or the obvious e-book, because no matter how long we’ve looked and no matter how many stores we’ve visited, nothing is cheaper than Amazon.

You know that the publishing industry is in a perpetual state of crisis.

It makes going to your local book store an even more significant experience. To think that the little rolling carts outside lined with bargains might not be there in a year; to think that the shelves stacked to the ceiling with their peeling tape labels and faded black marker might thin until one day you don’t need a ladder, until one day you don’t need a stepstool, until there’s no longer a need to stack books on top of one another, until there’s gap on every shelf; to think that you’ll one day never get the chance to ask the boy behind the counter about the new Philip Roth novel—it actually affects your heartbeat. You can feel it, hanging there between your lungs. Books are that important to you—so important that the so-called endangered book culture is cause for constant anxiety.

When you tell people that you love books, you mean it. “I’m not fucking around,” you’re tempted to say, because it almost feels like a necessary addendum. For you, spending an afternoon rearranging your books until they’re sorted by country instead of author doesn’t seem like a waste of time, even though you know you’ll change them back the following week. It’s that love that makes you stare at them and wonder what to read next, even though you’ve only just started another book. It’s that love that makes you pluck from the shelf a stray volume of the Harvard Classics—found years ago on one of those bargain carts—and thumb through it. It’s that love that makes you revel in the physicality of the book, as an artifact that’s tactile, that’s pleasing; and it’s that physicality, that smell, always there to reinforce that love.

So it’s no surprise, your anxiety.

Holding a book in your lap—it’s become a terrible thing, a moment of joy fused with that anxiety.

Because we’re afraid, all of us, of transience, of the notion that nothing is permanent, that we might lose something we love.

One’s tempted to say we’d be better off not reading the news.

There’s something fatalistic about it, the news, and its low-decibel humming of the death of the novel and the decline of the review. As Katie Roiphe said in a January essay for the New York Times, “There is, for the critic, a certain romance in describing oneself as standing in the midst of a grave intellectual crisis, solitary, imperiled, in the vast desert of our cultural landscape. There is, in this stance of the underdog defender of all that matters, a certain pleasing drama, an attractive nobility.” Is it really that romantic, though, this anxiety? Is it really titillating to think that you, perusing your favorite book store, might be book culture’s last defense against annihilation—especially when you, if you’re honest with yourself, know that you aren’t much of a defense?

There’s another side to all this, of course. There are the writers who call the doomsayers as they are, who label the old-time critics as crybabies. Of course book culture will go on, they say. This is just a change in medium. Besides, physical books will still be around for decades. Look at vinyl records.

That’s totally different, you’re tempted to say.

Still, this other side—it can’t help but give you hope, and that’s how you project yourself out into the literary world, as hopeful. Independents will survive because they can’t be duplicated online, you tell your friends. More people will read literary magazines now that they’re more widely available.

Even though nobody would think of paying for them.

That’s what we have going for us, isn’t it—that certain something that can’t be duplicated? In the end, can we really trust a one star Amazon review? Can we really explore the full range of literature based off sponsored recommendations? Can the love and absolute adoration of books really be trumped by a money-driven system that’s only managing to shrink?

It wasn’t long ago that you made a conscious decision. Buying a book is now an act of morality. Buying anything, in the modern world, is an act of conscience. You have to ask yourself what’s more important to you—saving money or supporting a healthy book culture. Even though so many people out there—even in the literary world—don’t think twice about this quagmire, it’s always on your mind. For you, skipping an evening at a restaurant in exchange for buying a hardcover at your local independent book store is more than worth it. Even though the majority of this nation’s—and this world’s—readers will shop for the best bargain, there’s you, and there’s a handful of others, who won’t.

Books will go the way of vinyl records, eventually.

It will take a long time, but it’s inevitable.

Maybe you’ll feel ambitious one day. Maybe you’ll petition the nation’s publishers to band together and cancel all their contracts with Amazon, simply to ensure that they survive.

Maybe you’ll help, one day, to make literature a little less corporate.²

More than anything you want that anxiety to go away. You want to sit down and hold a book in your lap without thinking about its impermanence, without thinking of the fact that ten years from now our most brilliant books won’t be published because they simply won’t sell.

Or maybe they will sell, and they’ll sell even better, because of some great shift in our system, because writers have wrested control from the publishers.

There’s no way to tell, really.

When you tell people that you love books, you mean it. “I’m not fucking around,” you’re tempted to say, because you don’t fuck around. Not anymore.

One’s tempted to say we are better off reading the news, not to mention making our own.

***
1: John Waters

2: For a brilliant essay on what Amazon is doing to book culture, don’t miss Onnesha Roychoudhuri’s piece in the Boston Review.