Welcome to the Unbridled Books' Publisher Blog, which features weekly reflections on the publishing world by Fred Ramey. Click here to subscribe, or visit the archive page.

Little Magazines and Small Pressures

We’re just back from the Association of Writing Programs conference in Atlanta, and once I fold in my cranky belief that I was personally dissed by John Barth, it was a rangy experience. Though Greg goes to the conference every year and seemed to know everybody in the building, I hadn’t attended since 1994 when it was in Tempe, Arizona. We had a tiny MacMurray & Beck table back then, with only two works of fiction in print and three authors in tow: the two novelists from our first fiction season, Laura Hendrie and Barbara Nelson, plus Cathryn Alpert, whose novel wasn’t even out yet.

I don’t think there were 300 attendees back then.

There must have been 300 panels in Atlanta.

We crossed paths there with six Unbridled authors who graciously introduced us to a power of up-and-coming writers. Like the Oxford Conference for the Book, AWP is a place to reaffirm the possibilities of a literary community. And it was rewarding to see, not only so many other independent presses there, but what seems to be a rebirth of literary journals. There were so many I hadn’t heard of. This may be just my own isolation in Denver. But it seems to me possible that it’s another indication of the resilience — or the imperative, the inevitability — of poetry and good fiction. Writing will out.

I took part in several conversations about the forthcoming but unrecognizable changes in publishing. There were also laments over the loss of opportunities for bringing short fiction to a mass audience, for publishing a quality novel, and more significantly for an author’s publishing a second quality novel. Amongst the tables of all those beautifully—or oppositionally—produced journals were also some brave and committed publishers of books that were on the table because they matter.

And, of course, the number of attendees (someone said 5,000) is the face of a truly important off-the-Island literary culture that can sometimes seem invisible. A culture that we’re told every day is either dead or dying. And most of the folks in those rooms were fairly young (by my measure). It struck me at one moment that if everyone who attended the conference bought a copy of one of the books on those tables—the same book—and if most of those who read it led their friends, students, and colleagues to buy a copy—I mean, if the literary community itself applied its own pressure behind a book, that book would eventually make a bestselling list somewhere, even though none of the tastemakers in the Now Now Culture and no celebrity had ever heard of it.

Me, I find that possibility invigorating. I came home to another article about the Sony e-book reader in the local Sunday paper. Reading it, sighing, and pondering again what’s next in publishing, I kept envisioning that hall in Atlanta full of literary folks, all engaged in animated conversation about the words that are most insistent, the words that move them every day.

Fred Ramey
posted 3/6/07

 
 

Commenting is closed for this article.

<<<
>>>