I gave another informational interview today to a young woman about to graduate college. I was super distracted the entire time, wondering if I could avoid the bread basket at lunch, if a certain author was going to blurb a book, how annoyed I was to get a one word response (“Thanks”) to a three page editorial letter. I was looking at her resume and it all looked good (Swahili! Varsity Tennis! Poetry Prize!), but my mind was on whether I could take the week between Christmas and New Years and finish my fucking screenplay, if I left the money on the kitchen table for Pam our dog walker, if I was ever going to finish vetting the contract on my desk, and get the twenty galleys off  on my desk to my foreign agents. Or was I going to die under a pile of manuscripts, or crushed under an Ikea bookcase, or crushed under the huge wheel of the M5, or electrocuted by a live man hole, or go into anaphylaxis as a result of eating a pine nut and die?

The  girl looked up at me and said, “Can I ask you something?” Sure. “Do you like what you do?”

I love it, I said. I looked around at my book shelves and all the books I’ve sold or helped come into this world. I looked around at our beautiful office, which is a book and light filled loft. I really love it, I said. And she smiled, reassured it seemed, of what I’m not certain.

Do you like what you do?

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Last week at our agents’ lunch, we bid farewell to one of our founding members who is leaving the agenting fold. It’s been a decade since we first got together to commiserate and offer support. What unifies our group is that we were all editors, now agents. I think it’s a very strong bond because we all take an editorial approach to our work, for better or worse. In any case, someone asked our departing agent what he was going to miss most. “Being a writer’s first reader.”  We all mewed with identification. It is a sacred position to hold.

Some writers will share their work with fellow writer friends, or spouses, or their editors first. But for some writers, their agents will be their first readers. And there is something magnificent about that. Not always, of course. Sometimes it’s a slog. But when you are in the presence of truly great writing and you get to read it first, it’s not unlike falling backward into a drift of pristine snow and spreading your wings. Ew, did I really write that?

Who is your first reader?

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Dear Betsy-

Here’s a question that falls into the “there are no stupid questions” but it in fact it might be a stupid question. If you have never published (or sent anything out for that matter) but you have taken a writing workshop with someone who has literary clout, should you mention it? And I mean just state it, not say he/she fawned all over your writing or thought you were the next Aimee Bender. Or is that a Who Cares?

Thanks,

Name WItheld:

Dear Who Cares:

First of all, to set the record straight, there are such things as stupid questions. I always hated it when teachers said there were no stupid questions. There are and we all know when we hear one because we slap the palms of our hands to our foreheads and shake our heads or rolls our eyes. That said, I like your question. And no one has asked it.

I think when you mention that you’ve studied with this famous writer or that famous writer, there is an implicit endorsement of your work on the part of the writer. Presumably, this famous writer would give you a blurb. That’s about all you could hope for, but those blurbs are hard won and much beloved by publishers. Let’s say the famous writer barely knew you were alive or worse hated your work, I think I’d still mention it even though it’s false advertising. Look, you’re trying to stand out, why not say: I’ve studied fiction writing Charles Frazier, Charles Baxter and Charles Manson. No more, no less. It’s a credential.

Who have you studied with and would you mention it in a query letter?

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Today’s Style section in the NYT devoted a great deal of space to group of highly educated, underemployed kids who started their own on-line magazine called THe New Inquiry, in case you missed it, which would be nearly impossible given the ginormous picture of these really attractive lit slits and boy toy. Not a Flannery or Eudora among them. God, they’re hot. The literary world is really stepping up.

When Methuselah here was a cub herself, she started a magazine called Big Wednesday with two fellow poets from the Columbia Writing Program. We featured the work of Denis Johnson, Kate Braverman, Rick Moody, David Means, and others. Once a month we hosted a kind of free for all reading called WHeel of Poets and we had an actual wheel and an emcee called Jennifer Blowdryer with platinum blonde hair and a sexy snarl. Fuck if we didn’t have a lot of fun.

Making a magazine is the young writer’s equivalent of putting on a play. It’s that fantastic time in your life when you are nothing and everything, when you have to take what you want, create what you don’t have, band together or die. Algonquin Round Table, Bloomsbury Group, Merry Pranksters, THe Lost Generation, Big Wednesday. What is the point of being a writer if not gathering with other like minded assholes at a bar or cafe and insisting on your superiority. Writers hate each other and need each other and, I believe, will better survive this impossible Darwinian struggle and the world’s general indifference if they have a place to go, a magazine to behold, and a respite from being so alone.

How do you roll?

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Hello Ms Lerner

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When I packed up my bag for work this morning and hoisted the 500 or so pages of manuscript on my shoulder, I actually thought for the first time that maybe I should get a Kindle or a Nook. Then I thought, I’d rather be a hunchback than read on a screen. When I got on the train and unfurled my NYT, I noticed the man next to me reading from the well lit place of his ipad. Gosh, it sure looked cheery in there. And then I thought I can’t cope with any more chargers, passwords, etc. I imagined myself dangling from the end of a charger, the screen flashing: low battery, low battery. My epitaph: She Forgot Her Password.

Am I caving, softening, dropping a big fat Christmas hint? NO. No. no. (That was a diminishing echo.) Am I being knee jerk, Ludditious, digitally challenged? And what about the trees, the great north woods, the humming birds. Am I hurting the earth by reading your manuscript? Am I killing the planet with your memoir?

Some people say that all that matters are the words, the “delivery system” is irrelevant. Isn’t that like saying all that matters is the sperm,  not the hot hunk of burning flesh that delivers it?

Let’s not get into a big debate. I just want to take an informal poll. So please,  fill in the blank. My preferred delivery system is __________________________, and everyone else can go fuck themselves.

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Ruth Stone 1915-2011

The poet Ruth Stone died on Thanksgiving. She was 96. At the tender age of 85 she won a National Book Critics Circle Award, and at 87 she won the National Book Award for her collection In the NExt Galaxy.  In the NY Times obituary, I was startled to learn that her husband, also a promising poet, committed suicide just as her first book was about to be published. They had three young daughters, who she raised in near poverty according to the article. She somehow made it as an “itinerant” professor, and she published thirteen poetry collections. I’ve just ordered two of her books and this will be my Christmas project. I should have discovered her sooner. She led the life I always fantasized about, was romanced by as a young girl, love and suffering, language, tragedy, living that one life and no other, ta tum, ta tum, ta tum, ta tum, one slim volume after another, spines skinny as matchbooks.

When she won the National Book Award, Stone said in her acceptance speech, “They probably gave it to me because I’m old. I’ve been writing poetry, or whatever it is, since I was 5 or 6 years old. I don’t know why I did it. It was like a stream alongside me. It just talks to me, and I write it down.”

A stream alongside me.

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One day in a high school English class, a teacher handed out construction paper and crayons. Then he wrote a short poem on the board by William Carlos Williams.

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

He asked us to draw the scene as we saw it in our mind’s eye. Then, like first graders, we taped our pictures to the board. No two pictures were alike. Some had two chickens, some had more. Some of us drew the chickens on the right, on the left, in front of, in back of, etc. The wheelbarrow was many shades of red: blood, rust, crimson, maroon. And the wheelbarrow was everything from a classic three wheeler to a wooden cart out of a shtetl. Of course, our poor drawing skills were largely to blame, but the teacher’s point was blatant: a reader’s imagination took its cues from a writer’s words. Much is left open to interpretation. And it’s always stayed with me.

Does a great writer better control what a readers sees, feels, experiences. Is this what it means to have a reader in the palm of your hand?  This is a huge topic, what goes on between a reader’s imagination and the words on the page. Are we even reading the same book? How many chickens?

Over to you.

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Well, here we are again, a season in hell. Thanksgiving through New Years. If I had my druthers (druthers? who the fuck am I?),  I’d be on a valium drip at a twenty-plex. I know it’s a cliche to hate the holidays, but I really hate them. All that enforced gaiety. All those carbs. All the guilt over what you do or don’t do, give or don’t give. The happy families in holiday sweaters or sailing on a brighter horizon: merry xmas from the Knopfs! The Jew on Christmas. The crescendo of family failings. The wrong gift. Please write. The new year is upon us. It doesn’t mean a thing. Just write. Every fucking day. Finish the fucker.

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If you don’t have a referral, a newly minted writing prize like the Whiting, or a story in the New Yorker, you need to introduce yourself and your work to editors and agents. Query letters come in all shapes and sizes and sadly most of them fail to accomplish what they most desperately need to do: spark interest. That’s all you really have to do: spark interest. You can do this with your title, your credentials, the one or two sentences that sum up your project. Mostly, you need to do this with the writing. Writers know how to write, how to manipulate, seduce, win friends and influence people. My advice: keep it simple. No bells, no bows, no bending over. Don’t over promise. Don’t make something out of nothing. Don’t try something stupid, whacky, quirky or attention getting.  This is first and foremost a professional gambit.

‘Pelt and Other Stories’ is a collection of characters (some interlinked) living in Africa and Europe, whose lives all undergo surprising and even unwilling evolution: two English snowboarders challenge the savagery of mountain weather in the Dolomites; a pregnant Ghanaian woman strokes across a hotel pool in the tropics; Celeste visits her suicidal brother and his lover in Berlin and realises she will never see them again.

This works for me because I love the title PELT. Then, I like the brief descriptions that zoom all over the world from snowboarding, pregnant swim strokes to a suicidal brother in Berlin. I’m in and I don’t like stories.

I knew my father for only a very short time as an adult, and I associate two things with him: science and loss.

I like this a lot. It’s simple. Science and loss. Again, what comes next is critical. You might be tempted to explain, but I think the simplicity should speak for itself.

If Independent Clause and Catherine would like to send their letters to me at askbetsylerner@gmail.com, I will critique the letters for you. Let me know if I can post the letter for feedback from everyone. Either way is fine. Thanks to everyone for participating. If you have more questions about the query letter, please ask. I want your letters to get you through the door. If the manuscript sucks, well, it sucks. But I want to help you get through that fucking door.

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