Such a merited conclusion, even drawn from a single line or title, pays due tribute to Graham’s laudable expansion on her now-trademark themes and craftsmanship on display in P L A C E. However, the present evokes a more ambiguous attitude in a vast number of Graham’s poems, old and new. One of her primary concerns has always been the individual’s seeming lack of agency in the universe and the unrelenting passage of time—not its immediacy. Place is, after all, the concept frequently pitted against time in opposition. A location is steady and reliable; it may change over time but is nonetheless something we can return to even if only to reflect upon other changes that have occurred since the last present moment we stood there. For Graham, history is a main platform for this idea. Her many works regarding the biblical creation saga, for example, figure the first man and woman as part of an intricate pattern of stitches; similarly, Penelope, the patient wife of Odysseus, almost collaborates in entrapping herself in the “hurry” and “delay” of her present, unweaving her cloth every night to preserve her longing. The new poems, too, are saturated with images of finality and protracted decay. “END (November 21, 2010)” paints a landscape ensconced in “Deep fog. . . . Fog all over the / field. . . . in /there this / animal / dying slowly / in eternity its / trap”; likewise, “DIALOGUE (OF THE IMAGINATION’S FEAR)” juxtaposes the vacant lots of foreclosed houses—where “We stand still. Let the cold wind wrap round go / into hair in- /between fingers”—with the natural renewal, and energized arrival, of “Spring!”

This apparent defeat of life in the present is also clear in Graham’s form and style. Her poems are notably long and discursive, addressing deep ideas with deep images and a highly introspective tone. To title a poem “OF INNER EXPERIENCE” indeed implies the lines therein will be something of an accretion, if not an explicit derivation. They describe and draw conclusions from multiple occasions of present experience—even if they are as rich, as they are here, as “Eyes shut I sense I am awakening & then I am / awake . . . first winter morning coming on all round.” There is also “LAPSE (Summer Solstice, 1983, Iowa City),” whose seemingly specific title—an irregular moment in time and place, a disruption of the normal rhythm of days—belies its real duration: the poem stretches across three entire pages without a single stanza break. It describes the speaker pushing her baby daughter on the swing for the first time, an experience that only reveals to her “the given you shall never enter / no matter how long time is—never—” Homing in on time and place, as other poems do, this title recalls the motif of x and y axes prominent in earlier collections: in the system of Cartesean geometry, these represent time and distance and often show trends or spans, not a single instant. Time and place are part of an intricate design, one whose meaning only comes into focus when perceived from an aerial view.

This sense of plotting finds further manifestation in Graham’s structures. “LAPSE” is one of few in P L A C E that does not follow Graham’s preferred poetic shape, which consists of text bifurcated down the page. With this form, she creates a visual dichotomy not only reflective of a carefully contemplated and honed style, but also a doubleness, a resistance to taking a stance on a singular moment or location. As in the following example, the enjambed lines align the form with their rotational content:

These poems, despite their ambiguity about the past and future, seem anything but urgent. They perhaps even condemn the “occasion” from which they sprung as a futile, searching loop.

Yet what seems to the comparative benchmark for human stagnation in these examples—the natural world—also calls up the present with the most vigor and force. Continuing to explore crucial environmental concerns from earlier collections, most notably Sea Change (2008), Graham embraces the present as a state of unknowable flux, at times terribly disconcerting. Interpreted as such, the present remains Graham’s impetus for poetry but without its traditional concision. Her long lines are, rather, perfectly shaped to capture the experience of Earth’s rotation in “EARTH,” where a speaker apostrophizes to “my planet,” attentively observing

Precision saturates these lines, from the definite articles to adjectives and verbs: “the” room and “this” floor are where the smallest, “infinitesimal” units of time can be traced; the “is” at the end of lines reinforces the concreteness of being (indeed, the “present” tense) in this setting—and even within the line itself. Through both its conceptual and formal manifestations, then, place literally captures an occasion from start to finish.

It is when this microscopic situation conflates with human imagination—another Stevensian territory—that Graham’s idea of place takes on its greatest meaning. Here, we see imagination taking the lead in transforming the shifting ray of light into a bird’s wing. This may seem a lovely, yet ultimately arbitrary, metaphor at first, but it reflects a dominant manifestation of place in P L A C E: sound, like songs and music, is a placeholder for or evidence of a particular moment in time, which is uttered in a particular location forever changed by its presence thereafter. Birdsong is the form this takes in the natural world: bird on a speaker’s rail accompanies the sun’s movement across a flower “at this exact / speed—right now—right here—now it is gone—yet go back up / five lines it is still there,” and when it emits just one note we feel “the visible heat of its / inwardness . . . until the whole / shape of the song is wisped- / up and / shuts, / the singing / shuts, the form / complete, the breath-bird / free to / rise away into the young day and / not be—” Embodying a fleeing, yet utterly complete sensation locked in poetic memory, such sounds echo throughout P L A C E. This one occurs at the end of the first of its five sections; another replies in part four, where divine redemption is found when, after the speaker wakes to the church bell whose message “stays for its millennia / the same, dripping in flames,” the congregation offers “everything they have. They sing.” All of time, all experience, exists in these sounds as a way to give meaning to the present.

But what, essentially, are these so saturated sounds? Graham’s lines, of course. With their innate musicality and rigorous respiratory demands, they are songs unto themselves. In such a connection between form and content, then, lies the inherent value and urgency of P L A C E. The effortless way she navigates transitory states in enjambments—“The transition from one state to the / other—they / give, you / receive, provides its shape”; the turns that make literal the etymological root of her “verse”; the connection of speech, breath, and writing to time such that putting pen to paper erects a bridge ensuring “that tomorrow be invested / with today”: all of these characteristics show her actively trying to preserve the present and all of its aesthetic and social implications. In an environment where change is the norm, nothing is certain, and questions about human agency arise with each natural or technological crisis, poetry may seem a feeble reply to such overwhelming exigencies. But as a prophet of environmentalism and champion of the will over crushing, cosmic fate, Graham uses poems to poignantly acknowledge that the earth—and ourselves—are places that need our dire attention.

In an earlier collection, Graham’s speaker asks “What should the poem do?” P L A C E offers a searing answer to this plea. As a vessel of experience, a shape to mark the now and direct us toward a better one, the poem becomes “the expanse- / column of place in / place humming….To have / a body. A borderline / of ethics and reason.” Indeed, Graham not only creates such a place for us as a poet, but she makes it one we would want to inhabit for eternity—and make ourselves worthy of inhabiting. She eagerly, swiftly, answers the cry of her aesthetic occasion—her own lines that “whisper into my ear we need you”—as an unignorable presence in the landscape of American poetry. It certainly wouldn’t be the same without her.

Buy it here: Amazon •  Barnes and Nobles • IndieBound

I first became aware of the THAT girl meme by watching an episode of Friends that aired when I was in the seventh grade. The storyline entailed a particularly heated Thanksgiving Day football game for which the gang was divided into teams by gender. Phoebe, looking adorably sporty in braid buns, hit the field with a shirt that had an abstract cartoon drawing of a woman’s face with the words “THAT GIRL” beneath. It occurs to me only as I write this how strange, perhaps disturbing, it is that even then, before I hit high school, I was familiar with THAT girl.  She was the girl who was a little clingy, a little desperate, a little too available. She was the girl who was overly confident about her prospects with guys ten times out of her league. She was the girl who called the day after the first date and was as unaware of the concept of playing it coy as she was of the volume of her voice when asking other girls if she should try asking him out for another night, when he maybe wasn’t washing his hair. In short, she was the girl you didn’t want to be. Phoebe’s shirt was awesome because she was taking THAT girl back. Announcing “Yeah, maybe I do care more. What of it?” It was in taking ownership of being THAT girl that she diminished a little bit of the power people wield when they label a woman that way. (More recently, Bridget Jones and Zooey Deschanel’s New Girl have also made great strides for THAT girl.)

When I got to college and engaged in dorm-room reminiscing about favorite sitcoms from childhood (Saved by the Bell and Friends, hands down), I discovered how many people remembered Phoebe’s shirt from a six-year-old episode. People remembered it so vividly and so fondly that there was even talk of us dressing as Phoebe’s version of THAT girl for Halloween. At the time this remembrance struck me as shocking, given that her shirt was never addressed in the show’s dialogue, and never factored into the episode’s plot. It doesn’t surprise me anymore. We remembered it because we’ve all been afraid, at one point or another, of falling prey to the urges of THAT girl living inside us. Soliciting advice from each other, we’d often close the pitch for our proposed plan of action with, “What do you think? Too much? I don’t want to be THAT girl.” We said “THAT girl” in an exaggerated whisper the way we might’ve said “cancer.” And most of us, often after a certain number of adult beverages, have been THAT girl: in a phone call to an ex, a premature comment to a new suitor, a particularly creepy session of Facebook-stalking that ends in an impulsive and ill-advised wall post. Optimists might claim that fear of becoming THAT girl on a more permanent basis keeps us in line, on our best behavior. In short: THAT girl behavior happens.

Never before, however, have I witnessed such a full-blown, hair-raising, “Oh no she didn’t” series of THAT girl moves as in the final sixty page of Anna Karenina. Reading them was like watching a friend toss a drink on an ex’s new girlfriend right before accusing him of being crazy. In his house. Even though they’d only even been dating for a few weeks before breaking up in the first place. While her skirt was tucked up into her underwear without her knowledge. Think I’m exaggerating? Let’s go to the text.  

Perhaps the greatest example of Anna’s THAT girl behavior is in her unfounded jealousy. Tolstoy tells us, “She was jealous, not of any one woman, but of the diminution of his love.  Not having as yet an object for her jealousy, she sought one. At the slightest hint she transferred her jealousy from one object to another. Now she was jealous of the coarse women with whom, through his bachelor connections, he might so easily have intercourse; now of the Society women whom he might meet; now of some imaginary girl whom he might marry after repudiating her.” Consciously deciding to be jealous of every woman who comes into contact with your boyfriend definitely qualifies as THAT girl behavior. As does actively looking for faults in your partner to whine and complain about: “Anna was indignant with him and constantly sought reasons to justify her indignations. She blamed him for everything that was hard in her situation.” Her melodramatic declarations that hinge on arbitrary factors also don’t help her case. When the jealousy-inducing boyfriend, Vronsky, leaves after a fight, she tells the housekeeper to tell him, upon his return, that she went to bed with a headache and does not want to be disturbed. She decides, “If he comes in spite of the maid’s message it means he still loves me. If not it means all is over.” And in the face of Vronsky’s claim that he wants them to get married so that their children will not suffer in illegitimacy, she says, “You want it for the children, but not for me.” I guess women’s magazines were advocating that we compete with our unborn children for our guys’ affection even then.

Even more incriminating THAT girl behavior can be found in the hours leading up to Anna’s dramatic and infamous last act. That morning, Vronsky goes to his mother’s house to finalize some business details necessary for him and Anna to go away to the country, as Anna has demanded they do. When she finds he is gone, Anna becomes frantic, and dispatches a desperate telegram telling him to come home immediately. When he doesn’t return right away she thinks, “But how could he go away leaving me in this condition? How can he go on living without having made up with me?” She then decides, in her harried state, to go in search of, if not him, then advice from others. She heads to her friend Dolly’s house. Dolly’s sister, Kitty, is the woman from whom Anna stole Vronsky. That Dolly has remained friends with Anna is quite generous to begin with. Dolly offers sage, comforting advice, but when Anna learns that Kitty—who Anna hasn’t seen since she swooped in on Vronksy—is visiting, she becomes irritated that Kitty hasn’t come out to see her. She asks quite rudely, “Is Kitty hiding from me then?” Letting your complicated feelings toward your fella alienate you from the gals has long been one of the biggest risks implicit in THAT girl behavior.

Even Anna’s suicide is meant to teach Vronsky a lesson—she essentially kills herself so that he’ll feel bad about it.  Before she throws herself in front of the train she thinks, “There into the very middle, and I shall punish him and escape from everybody and from myself!” All she really wanted, it seems, was for him to take note of her. A THAT girl of today might try to achieve a similar end by letting herself into a boyfriend’s dorm room and defacing pictures of them as a couple after a particularly vicious fight. “Look what’ve you’ve done to our love!”

Yes, Leo was thorough in the portrait he painted of THAT girl. The question that leaves us with, of course, is if Anna Karenina is the original THAT girl, what does that make Tolstoy? The frat boy who won’t return our phone calls? (He does throw her under a train, which I guess you could say is the ultimate form of rejection.) Or is he in league with the clever creator of Phoebe’s t-shirt, and the writers of The New Girl? Did he invent THAT girl, or was he just the first person to help us take her back by illuminating her plight? As in: “Hey, ladies, don’t sweat it. Society makes this behavior inevitable, and it isn’t your fault. It happens to the best of us.” (Minus that pesky train, of course.)

And so, given the closing of the great digital divide, how do I begin to tell you about Sugar? Or, by that extension, Cheryl Strayed? I fell in love with them both, but not until recently did I understand that they were one and the same. It was a monumental discovery, like finding out that Clark Kent and Superman were, in fact, the same person. I had devoured the galley of Wild, Strayed’s luminous memoir of lugging the grief and despair of her twenty-something years up the long path of the Pacific Crest Trail, and I knew it would be one of my most-passionately recommended reads of 2012. It’s rare to see a memoir where the author was both bold and admirable and yet flawed and humble. I felt like Strayed, in her journey into the wilderness, was a stand-in for every one of who attempts a journey not knowing where they’d end up…I adored her, as a writer and as a kindred spirit.

And over in the blogosphere, as I wrote book reviews for The Rumpus, I fell in love with Sugar, the advice columnist doled out treatises of harsh but poetic truths. Sometimes the problems sent in are straightforward, on love and loss, and Sugar speaks of the courage required to be patient and to walk away. But Sugar talks about personal problems as though they are epic fictional quandaries. A despair over the “what-if” of a future cancer diagnosis becomes personified as a crazy lady that lives inside our heads. “Only the crazy lady is pretty convinced you’ll get cancer and die young. All the rest of us are entirely in the dark.” And when the quandaries are big, she reaches into her personal history, exposing as much of herself as those that write in. To a man who was still struggling to come back from the death of his son four years prior, Sugar says, ” When my son was six he said, ‘We don’t know how many years we have for our lives. People die at all ages.’ He said it without anguish or remorse, without fear or desire. It has been healing to me to accept in a very simple way that my mother’s life was 45 years long, that there was nothing beyond that. There was only my expectation that there would be—my mother at 89, my mother at 63, my mother at 46. Those things don’t exist. They never did.”

I am enchanted and moved every time I read a Sugar column, but I somehow never pictured her as an actual person. I imagined some kind of floating deity, some sort of great benevolent Buddha (with fabulous pink hair), who had wisdom that would keep them out of the everyday uncertainties and sorrows that made up her column’s readership. I was in awe, then, at the possibility that she was, in fact, speaking from a great deal of experience. How could Sugar, this ethereal Good Witch, and Cheryl Strayed, a profoundly compassionate writer, but a human one at that, be the same person? And how could she maintain her magic once her true identity had been unmasked? And which force would we celebrate? The real woman, or the figure we imagined into reality?This was the question that came up at this past Monday’s event, titled “A Wild Night with Sugar and the Rumpus, Starring Cheryl Strayed.” The structure of that headline was already perplexing–what would we be celebrating, the voice of inspiration or the voice of experience? By the time I reached the wide metal steps of the Housing Works flagship bookstore, the line of waiting attendees already stretched around the block, so clearly they weren’t troubled by this paradox. Few of them carried a copy of Strayed’s memoir; they might buy that inside, once they’d heard Sugar read those words aloud. Once inside, they shook hands with Rumpus writers, hugged their fellow Sugar fans, and bought mugs with Sugar’s most famous saying. (They filled said mugs with water, beer, and too-sweet white wine.)Why this phrase has caught on, of course, is the exact problem at the center of Sugar’s appeal. The phrase on this mug comes from a letter she wrote to an aspiring author, who spoke of being terrified that, as a woman writer, she would never find the audience she deserved because she could only write “as a woman.” Sugar urged her to be brave, to acknowledge the terror and humility of writing even as she strove boldly on. She concluded her response by compelling her to write, “Not like a girl. Not like a boy. Write like a motherfucker.” The idea is to write outside of identity that might pigeonhole you, but not to write disingenuously. Simply, to write what’s true and brave–perhaps the hardest kind of writing of all.

That clarion call is what moved Sugar’s fans to attend this event, and what made it especially great to hear her fellow writers–fans and colleagues–come up on stage and read those columns that spoke most poignantly to them.Pam Houston took the stage and quoted from “The God of Doing it Anyway,” a call to all writers that worry about lacking an audience. “We all start out without an audience and with a handicap,” Sugar said, and Houston read, grinning.Emily St. John Mandel read from Sugar’s response to a man who was uncertain about his desire to become a parent. “The question, sweet pea,” Sugar responded, “is who you intend to be.” She salutes the possibility of imagining a different life for ourselves, and then letting that be “the ghost ship that didn’t carry us. There’s nothing to do but salute it from the shore.”Gabrielle Hamilton, an author who has similarly left me starstruck, took the stage, and it felt like standing at some crazy literary intersection of Memoirland, to see one truth-telling author applauding another.

When, at long last, Sugar finally took the stage, she was finally called–and applauded–by name. The entire night, I’d been tracking my fellow audience members as they tweeted to the hashtag #wildsugar, quoting the best lines from the best columns and letting Sugar’s poetic response hang heavy in the air. From my vantage point in the balcony of the bookstore, I couldn’t see what Sugar’s response looked like in person. Was she nodding her head in assent? Was she blushing furiously? Or was she simply waiting her turn, so that she might finally let Sugar step off the stage and let herself step on?

The woman who stood before us, the glossy copy of her memoir in hand, was nothing less than radiant, and smiled warmly at the crowd going crazy with applause. And yet she was real–with normal hair, normal rings on her normal fingers, black boots that zipped rather than simply affixing themselves to her legs by force of will. It seems silly, I know, to marvel that one’s literary heroes are human. But in this moment of hearing Sugar called to the stage, and having Cheryl Strayed take her place, the myth suddenly exploded into dust. The opportunity, then, is the real author’s, to bring us back to earth with her completely true, completely amazing story.

Sullivan seeks out subjects designed to repel the culturally sophisticated: an evangelical Christian rock concert; an embittered, dying, 92-year-old Southern writer, capable of racist and anti-Semitic invective; the Tea Party; perennially tanned cast members of the MTV reality series The Real World. And just when you expect a snide aside or a dismissive eye-roll, Sullivan surprises you—shames you—with empathy for his subjects.

In the very first paragraph of the first essay in the book, “Upon This Rock,” a chronicle of the author’s journey to the Creation Festival in rural Pennsylvania, Sullivan sets up the reader to expect cheap laughs and armchair anthropology:

[M]y plan was perfect… I’d stand at the edge of the crowd and take notes on the scene, chat up the occasional audience member (“What’s harder—homeschooling or regular schooling?”), then flash my pass to get backstage, where I’d rap with the artists themselves. The singer could feed me his bit about how all music glorifies Him, when it’s performed with a loving spirit, and I’d jot down every tenth worth, inwardly smiling. Later that night I might sneak some hooch in my rental car and invite myself to lie with a prayer group by their fire, for the fellowship of it. Fly home, stir in statistics. Paycheck.

Sullivan knows what we want—to feel superior, to reaffirm our standing in the world—and the lazy part of him wants it too. But he stretches himself, and forces us to join him in the strenuous task of taking his subjects seriously, and probing his own assumptions in the process.

He zeroes in on a group of sincere young West Virginians with dark histories and loaded guns—precisely the people most of us spend our lives avoiding—and asks, “Who are you guys?” Sullivan hangs out with them for days: they offer him sassafras tea, and later, barbecued frog; they sing their own Christian rock songs over the campfire, and Sullivan counters with a well-received rendition of Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song”; and they explain how they came to be believers, in the wake of jail time and “terrific violence,” including the murder of friends and family members. By delving into the specific circumstances of their religious awakenings—and interspersing bits of memoir about his own short-lived Evangelical phase—Sullivan takes an easily mocked subject and beautifully captures the appeal of Christ’s embrace.

He concludes the essay not by congratulating himself for outgrowing his infatuation with Christ, but by admiring the way these young men remain faithful. Darius, one of the group, tells him, “Put in there that we love God… You can say we’re crazy, but say we love God.” Sullivan writes: “[I]t’s true, I would have said it even if Darius hasn’t asked me to, it may be the truest thing I will have written here: they were crazy, and they loved God—and I thought about the unimpeachable dignity of that, which I was never capable of.” There is a particular quality to Sullivan’s approach to his subjects: it’s more than empathy; it’s esteem. He is so attuned to their passions and idiosyncratic insights, he doesn’t just understand where they’re coming from; he actually learns from them. In Sullivan’s world, everyone is a teacher.

Sullivan does not romanticize his subjects, and he’s not immune to ribbing them for their abhorrent views or lack of sophistication. But when he does it, it feels far fairer, far more earned, because he takes great care to elucidate the worthwhile in his subjects. In “Getting Down to What is Really Real,” he tags along with the Miz—a star of MTV’s The Real World, who is “bright-eyed and symmetrical-faced, fed on genetically modified corn, with the swollen, hairless torso of the aspiring wrestler he happened to be” – to a paid appearance at a Chapel Hill nightclub. Sullivan observes the Miz downing shot after shot, engaging in trite conversation with fans about the show, and signing breasts. As he departs the bar, he takes a final look back at the Miz:

In that moment, I found it awfully hard to think anything bad about the Miz. Remember your senior year in college, what that was like? Partying was the only thing you had to worry about, and when you went out, you could feel people thinking you were cool. The whole idea of being a young American seemed fun. Remember that? Me neither. But the Miz remembers. He figured out a way to never leave that place. Bless him, bros.

Sullivan peppers his response to the Miz with irony—“Me neither”—but refuses to simply mourn the Miz’s shallow existence. It’s exhilarating to see Sullivan’s mind at work—the way he oscillates between geniality and biting critique—and ultimately arrives at the conclusion that there is something admirable in Miz’s unshakable youthfulness. Sullivan’s is a large-hearted irony: he shares the dry sensibility of his literary moment, but like David Foster Wallace, he is capable of dredging the decent out of the muck.

Even among Tea Partiers at a raucous town hall meeting in Virginia, Sullivan, an admitted progressive, finds a way to emerge inspired. A man shouts at his Congressman, “Where in the Constitution does it state that we are required to provide health care for everybody?” And Sullivan writes:

I liked the man’s question. His attitude was belligerent to a level of several hundred percent past what the moment called for, but he embodied something beautiful about the health care reform debate as it had evolved this year. Unlike with most questions of national import, even the wars, you can’t get into this one without talk about the whole point of America… At moments like this one, we remember that we still exist inside the matrix of an eighteenth-century experiment in Enlightenment political thought—we are in a sense the subjects of that experiment—and we interrogate the nature of it.

It’s no easy feat to witness people you vehemently disagree with venomously attack not only a cause you believe in, but you, for believing in that cause—and walk away feeling grateful that they forced you to engage in a far broader quarrel about the meaning of America. There’s a fundamental Americanness to Sullivan’s writing, an optimism that undergirds the ongoing argument within: that slowly, painfully, the idea will scrap its way towards the ideal.

Buy it here: Amazon • Barnes & Noble • Indiebound • Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Many see self-publishing as a sort of runner-up to the grand prize. A way to settle should a publisher or agent not want to invest in a writer’s work. Admittedly, I was of this belief when I started out. But as I moved through this process, I started to realize that this avenue might actually be better positioned to my situation, my skills, and my aspirations. Of course, I could benefit from the expertise of established professionals in the field. I would be thrilled to have a mentor. A guide. But the traditional industry could not lend any and, as is the case with any new industry, Self Publishing does not seem to have them yet. But this won’t be the case forever…

So, for the sake of my peers and based on the lessons of my own experience, I’m declaring this (with about as much authority as one person can have over such a thing), the Self Published Manifesto, for the Self-Published among us:

We, the Self Published are not some chaotic swarm of undiscovered, less-than-adequate writers. Nor do we represent a body of work that is unedited, raw, or downright awful. These works may exist in the self-publo-sphere, but this seems to be the case anywhere, even through traditional publishing avenues. Sloppy, awful writing exists in all spheres and is scary wherever you find it.

Most of us have sought recognition from established entities, big presses; small press; university presses; magazines; bloggers; agents; bakers; candlestick makers, only to get lost in the proverbial slush pile. In other words, the decision to “self-publish” is likely not a choice for most of us, or any of us for that matter. But that doesn’t mean it couldn’t one day be a choice, a good, solid choice. Like a small, private college somewhere in rural Pennsylvania that has eleven students and specializes in Eastern European studies. That kind of choice. Right for some, not for all. One day, perhaps, it will gain enough respect to be viewed as an option, rather than something for which we’ve settled. On this point, I think about the personal contact I’ve been able to have with readers as a result of facilitating all my own marketing and production. There is no greater feeling than having direct, in-depth conversations with readers about my work and operating “in the trenches” has allowed these relationships to develop and flourish. Also, self-publishing could one day be the “right” choice for those of us who have a deep love for “process,” and emerge successful in situations where an entire process—from writing to editing, production, and marketing—is experienced and understood. Those are just two examples, but the experience of self-publishing would be attractive to a specific group of people for a number of reasons, and I hope this Manifesto encourages others to explain their reasons why.

Another thing about us Self-Publisheds: some of us just don’t know where we fit, or don’t fit “the mold” in a good way. Or we’re surrounded by people who don’t know where we fit and perceive that as a problem, or perhaps too great a risk. Or we self-publish to reach our niche audience more directly. Maybe we’re somewhere between literary and commercial. YA and adult. Biography and Science Fiction. We’re something like peanut butter and banana and bacon sandwiches; we can’t imagine who wouldn’t like us, but enough people just have to try it and declare that it’s AMAZING on Yelp in order to gain traction. We’re that sort of risk, sometimes.

For months, I’ve been working under an assumption based on social networking principles (something perfectly suited for self-publishing) that the choice of what to read is not dictated by an establishment at all. A publishing house doesn’t tell me what to read, any more than a bus advertisement or a T-shirt with a novel’s cover on it. It’s a peer-driven decision, based on recommendation. My best friend gives me a book, my husband, my dog, my boss and says “Read this. It’s awesome.” You know what? I’ll read it. I don’t check if it’s been traditionally published. And, you don’t necessarily need a traditional publishing model for this exchange to happen, only the right tools to get the book in the right hands and the ripple effect will take care of itself.

And since the Internet was invented by Al Gore, these networks have already been set up, waiting to be nurtured like an adorable little puppy that eats way too much. Facebook, GoodReads, Twitter, Shelfari, Kickstarter, they’re all out there. I know what my cousin’s best friend’s ex-boyfriend is reading in Topeka, Kansas. And I can start an email chat with this person, and hundreds of others, to find out if they’d be interested in reading my book, or if they have friends that would. At every moment, I have immediate access to multiple networks of readers who could be instantly satisfied, moved, angered, bored, and/or excited about my work. Sometimes, these efforts are not as far-reaching as a bus advertisement that moves down Broadway, but it works. And it’s also incredibly gratifying to be working this closely with individual readers and book clubs, one by one.

Above all, it’s about access. And we all have it, now. The overall process might be slower than traditional publishing and marketing, but the potential is all there.

In many cases, my experience has demonstrated that readers are more excited than myself or other writers to be a part of this movement. “Wow, the author contacted me yesterday, how cool!” said one potential reader (not verbatim) on GoodReads after I had contacted her—from the perspective of a self-published author who does all her own marketing—asking what drew her to my book. The theory is that simple: work through networks, and ask readers for feedback. It doesn’t work every time, but it works more often than it doesn’t. And that’s how theories become law, they work more times than they don’t. Or, they strike you unexpectedly as you hold a kite in a thunderstorm (and self publishing is a combination of working theories and thunderstorms).

This theory is not profit-driven per say, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be profitable soon. Because authors can now establish themselves with the one demographic that matters most: readers themselves.

Of course, there are some aspects of the process of self publishing that could be improved as we become more organized, smarter about our decisions, and as the process becomes more respected as a choice.

For one, it seems as though a lot of us pay a lot of money for editing services, marketing packages, and the like. In some ways, self-publishing companies are profiting from people like me who are willing to make a start-up investment toward their dream. Also, the community could be strengthened so self-published authors have access to a strong network of other Self-Publisheds and avoid common mistakes and scams.

I’m going to end with another aposiopesis, to convey what I feel is the most critical message of the Self-Publisheds, the rebuttal to the notion that there is some goal or endpoint in this process. If there is, then I don’t think I’ve reached it, or will ever reach it for that matter. That something can be “learned,” past tense, implies that there is a moment in which we no longer need to actively work to put ourselves out there (and on this point, I don’t think traditionally published authors have to work at this any less than us). I’m not sure that there will ever be an opportunity to discuss the publishing process in the past tense. It’s an evolving one, never-ending in a way. If I stop learning, I fall behind. The industry changes every day now, but that’s the beauty of such a beast. And the difference is, self-publishing has given me control over this process—I pursue avenues in my own way, I learn as I go. And for me this has turned out to be the best choice, to Self Publish, for myself.

We are participating in a profound moment in the publishing industry. A moment where digital media are pushing into traditional notions of what represents good writing, are changing the way we produce and share content, and, of course, read. To me, this represents the most interesting and exciting time to be a part of publishing. I would not have wanted to publish my work one hundred years ago, four decades or even a decade ago, even if it meant that my journey would be quicker or more lucrative or less complicated. This is the exact moment that I want to be published, exactly when I want to be self-published…

*on behalf of all or none or some number in between

Abby Slovin is a proud self-published author and her debut novel, Letters In Cardboard Boxes, is earning some solid reviews from readers and bloggers. More information on her and her work can be found at: www.abbyslovin.com 

 I know that I am not alone in feeling this way, and Agee’s is certainly not the only book that evokes in its audience such an ambivalent—and morally ambiguous—reaction. Real life seems terrible enough as it is, so why do we actively pursue it in other sources, especially those meant to provide escape, like art? To my mind, it’s part of a desperate need to be reassured of our existence. Seemingly undesirable un-niceties let us know we’re not alone in our pain, and observing even a falsified version of ourselves confronting equal or worse demons than our own is gratifying on a Darwinian level.

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, despite its inherent lyricism, is nonetheless nonfiction. Like watching the evening news, our reading of the families’ travails does not necessarily result in aesthetic distancing (although it often does in this case), and we can share in their humanity without having to stretch ourselves too far. What, then, are we to make of a book like Tupelo Hassman’s Girlchild (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $24.00)? This hauntingly devastating debut novel—a chronicle of a young girl growing up in Calle de las Flores, a trailer park in Reno, Nevada, in the 1960s—has no business being as authentic, and thusly satisfying, in its account of human suffering. Rory Dawn (“R.D.”) Hendrix is a product of Hassman’s skillful crafting, a talent no doubt honed while the author earned her MFA from Columbia. But Rory’s voice and her world read more like documentary than fiction. The book straddles the line between art and reality to an uncomfortable degree, and, as in real life, we can’t help but stare as the entire concept of normalcy at the Calle ignites in flames before our eyes. (Rory even provides factoids about how a real trailer would be incinerated, even how long it would take.) We devour every word, even though each turn of the page only breathes ferocious life into the blaze.

Even though we know it’s fiction, Girlchild’s heightened realism presents a complicated challenge to readers’ enjoyment. In part, this is due to the multiple narrative forms Hassman employs. All of the extremely short chapters are inflected with the voice and perspective of Rory, who’s far wiser than her eight years and eponymously controls the book. (Her grandmother affectionately calls her “girlchild” as a futile means to preserve her innocence.) But instead of through a continuous first-person narration, we learn about her family’s past and present from a variety of sources. The dated records of a welfare official, V. White, for example, tell us how Rory’s mother, Jo, was first pregnant at thirteen, has four children with different men, and abuses drugs, but, because she “seems to be in good physical condition” and is deemed a “fine-looking woman who lives in a well-kept, adequate home,” receives little of the necessary attention from the state; Rory notes this bureaucratic incompetence with both humor and disdain. We also see standardized test questions (with trailer park-specific answers), letters, recipes, obituaries and newspaper clips, court documents, and, most importantly, modified Girl Scout Handbook excerpts, all of which manifest themselves with alarming brevity. With no more than a page or so of evidence, it’s hard to determine what’s fact and what’s not, what’s a long-meditated adage or an off-the-cuff or snarky observation from Rory. She alternately assumes an intensely personal, pitifully self-aware tone—she declares, “My name is Rory Dawn Hendrix, feebleminded daughter of a feebleminded daughter, herself the product of feebleminded stock” on page five—and one of sarcastic reportage—we learn “The basic subsistence pattern on the Calle is commonly referred to as living paycheck to paycheck. . . . The Calle’s economic system is one of generalized reciprocity and enforces the interdependence of the group. Whoever has cigarettes left over after everyone else has smoked theirs is expected to share, with payback assumed on the following first or fifteenth” only seven pages but three chapters later. It takes a while to get accustomed to this voice; Hassman’s prose even comes off as inconsistent, scattered, overly ambitious in its literariness. Once we feel at home, we start to realize the potential unreliability of even external perspectives on her situation, and of Rory herself. The fictionality of the narrative collage shines through—an uneven, at times, human construct. And the momentum behind it comes from a child, whose innocence and particular vulnerability in her ever-narrowing world understandably limits what she can tell and show us.

But what’s on display here as documentary is not a world with rules or even a firm idea of “truth.” It is Rory herself: the “girlchild” who is also the book. A comparison with Nabokov’s Lolita is particularly apt in suggesting the metafictionality of her account, that with which we grapple as we determine how much empathy to feel for her. Rory’s most horrifying experience in the Calle is not poverty or hunger or a lack of an education: instead, like Dolores Haze, she is the victim of truly appalling sexual abuse, here by the “Hardware Man,” who rapes her in the back bathroom of his store, encouraging her to be quiet while her favorite new rainbow tee-shirt gets stained in more ways than one could ever see on the surface—even more than what the red rash blooming around her mouth belies. Indeed, if Lolita had a voice, it would probably sound something like Rory’s (perhaps with a slightly different accent and vernacular). We see the same suffering, the same anguish, the same irrevocable damage to a little girl’s self-esteem.

This is all the more difficult to read when we see Rory trying, in her earnest first-person, to take initiative to improve her lot. She becomes a troop-less Girl Scout, reads library books, does well in school, takes care of her mother. The fact that nothing comes from these endeavors is not all that surprising, but it still comes as a personal blow when we witness her failure and disappointment happening in seemingly real time. When she becomes a finalist in a spelling bee, she deliberately makes a mistake so as to save her family the expense of her advancement: traveling, new dresses, and a fundamental distance between her and her mother. It’s also not surprising that the word she misspells is “outlier” (which she deconstructs to o-u-t-l-i-a-r). To hope for success—the fictional happy ending we all root for for her sake, that which would make her an “outlier”—is a lie she is unwilling to tell herself. It’s certainly not something of which an ordinary child—or even most adults—would be able to convince themselves, and certainly not something someone make-believe would ever have to.

Instead, Rory’s story is one where innocence is never made manifest. The most difficult chapters to get through are those where thick black lines—as if the text were covered by black correction tape or an extra-wide Sharpie marker—tattoo the page, scenes of rape censored not for our sake, but for hers. The reality of it all is not mitigated by this visual silence, but heightened. What she’s going through is more intense as an off-stage, blacked-out attack, the purest document we could have of her mental state in those torturous moments. At that point, seeing two whole pages of this evidence is no longer insufficient, but too much. Far too much. In the same way that Lolita’s resounding silence constitutes her entire person in Lolita and allows Humbert Humbert to narrate and title the book as he does, this refusal of language unquestionably conflates Rory with the pages of Girlchild. The clever design of the physical book enhances this impression: the spine is adorned with a Dewey Decimal System number, and the front cover depicts a nearly-full check-out card that should be tucked safely inside. Rory has taken out her own self-titled book in order to live it, exposing her viscera with unabashed clarity. Only there is she the “girlchild” her grandmother hopes she’ll be, the pure and innocent eight-year-old with such promise and poise. But in so doing she admits awareness of this unreality. She’s not sure what to believe about herself—what to have faith in and what to disregard as fiction—an uncertainty she invites us to read about alongside her.

We never give up hope for Rory, even as her situation goes from bad to unbelievably worse. Hers is not a happy ending. She and we know and accept what’s coming. We reach the end cringing, knowing that our heroine is ultimately alone in the world. She escapes the fate of teenage pregnancy, but she does not escape sexual violation. It is doubtful she’ll ever go to college like the social worker—the “man in the suit”—suggests in the final pages, when she’s nearly completed high school and about to enter “the real world,” as it were. The fact that his shady presence insinuates continuing pedophilia highlights how sordid this fictional landscape actually is. Rory may have given herself Girl Scout badges in “God’s Eye” and “Puberty,” but such recognition has no meaning outside of her one-person troop. Like the makeshift Handbook she religiously follows and Girlchild itself, hope is the fiction that we never quite attain.

But the fact that we keep reading, plodding through the suffering of each page, is too much like reality to disregard. It’s what makes us seek those moments of compassion shared in the space of literature, even when we have to endure lots of pain to receive only some pleasure. We let our rainbows, even those silk-screened on tee-shirts, be occluded by thunder clouds because we believe, deep down, they’ll eventually shine through.

Buy it here: Amazon • Barnes & Noble • Indiebound • Farrar, Straus and Giroux

In this case there have been plenty of haters. A review in Publishers Weekly claimed, “The overall failure of this collection has nothing to do with its side project status and everything to do with its inability to grasp the same lesson lost on its gallery of high school reprobates: there is more to life than this.” Despite a few kind words in its opening, the San Francisco Weekly concluded, “Palo Alto is a failure, but an interesting one. You could read it and be engrossed by the dismayingly violent, drug-addled, and loveless lives of these mostly privileged white kids. But there’s not much more going on here beyond Franco reconstructing the pessimistic world—and worldviews—of his wandering protagonists.” The LA Times wrote, “After finishing Palo Alto one feels the urge to not so much review it as grade it. And not highly.”

Though I didn’t feel compelled to jump in on either side of the argument when Palo Alto was published, I am not entirely above the hoopla. When I opened the first issue of my new subscription to Ploughshares, Franco’s name was the first I noticed in the table of contents. I was surprised at the immediate and involuntary eye roll that followed. Really, I thought. It’s not enough that you were born with that face, make millions of dollars a year, and have your pick of both indie and blockbuster roles alike? You need to take one of the few fiction spots Ploughshares has to offer?

There was some jealousy behind this, I admit. As an MFA student I would sit through a 24 hour marathon of Tristan + Isolde to have my fiction published in Ploughshares. Determined not to let any bitterness cloud the issue, I set out to conclude whether or not I was hasty in my judgment.

I sent Franco’s Ploughshares story, along with two other pieces of fiction in the issue, to three MFA students (who, let’s face it, would be right there alongside me in that Tristan marathon). I deleted all traces of the authors’ identities before sending, and asked the participants to guess which of the three stories was Franco’s (a story entitled “The Deer”), and why they picked the stories they did. Their answers addressed more than the questions I posed—they took up the questions that surround this experiment: who gets to write fiction, and who are we writing for? Because even their tangents were wise and, ultimately, relevant, I include their answers in full below:

I am going to guess that “The Deer” is the story out of the three that was written by Franco—that is, the person whose celebrity may have played a small role in its selection for publication. If pressed for a reason, I guess I would suggest it’s because the story, like the critters in it, is a bit mangled. It reads like an exquisite corpse—a dragon head stuck onto a bear’s torso, the whole mess off it standing on two different kinds of feet. I think it had a tail at one point, but then it just kind of fell away. 

Also, because I suspect pot was at work. Not to suggest that Franco gets high. I believe he maintains that he does not.

But the story seemed to be developing this sort of folk tale thing, this idea of casting off of magical objects in order to escape from harm. Mirror, comb. Piglet head, deer leg. But then it just kind of stopped, like the author got, uh, distracted. Or maybe just because it seemed self-evident how, like, a deer leg soaring off the top of a parking garage just says everything, man, you know? But I don’t know. Because I’m not high, and because I don’t really know this character, or even if he’s really trying to get himself out of trouble.

I hope I’m wrong, though. That would be much more interesting. And either way, I think that Franco should keep writing. And come say hey the next time he’s in town.

—Meghan Gilliss, Bennington Writing Seminars

Picking out Franco’s piece is easy: just on subject matter alone, I would guess that he wrote “The Deer”—I don’t think he has the knowledge or patience to research wolves, and I somehow have this hunch he wouldn’t write from the point of view of a woman, but I totally think he would write about drugs.

I guess my feeling about “The Deer” is that its appeal rests in its colloquial tone—as if the narrator were simply telling you what happened, without deliberate ornamentation. But the trick with this kind of voice is that it has to lift off into poetry, eventually—and this story doesn’t. The ending doesn’t deliver. The sentences are all da-dum, da-dum. But honestly—and here is where I’m going to sound like a total grump—I wasn’t really wowed by the other stories, either. Which leads to the question: does anyone except writers read lit mags?

But anyway. “The Deer” is my guess. And—sorry, I know this is pathetic, and craven, and reveals that I have no willpower, and maybe completely ruins your experiment—but I couldn’t resist going to the Ploughshares website and checking. So I know I’m right. (Sorry.) But it makes sense that a man running from New Haven to New York to LA to wherever else would go for a ‘I’m so quick and off-the-cuff’ prose style. He doesn’t sit still long enough to ask what that dead deer means.

—Cyrus Greven, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop

Disclaimers:

1. I have not read James Franco’s Palo Alto (though it’s on my list) or anything else he’s written.
2. I am an unabashed fan of polymaths, and yet I believe that writing is a craft that requires a kind of blindered dedication. (So while I wish I knew how to change the oil in my car, I still struggle with popping the hood, which fact is excusable because I am Working on My Craft.)

My best guess is that, of the three anonymous Ploughshares stories, actor/artist/break-dancer James Franco penned “The Deer,” a piece which centers on the violence and drug ingestion of some unappealing teenagers in a land called Palo Alto. (A giveaway, perhaps?) I don’t necessarily want to evaluate Franco’s fiction, or to enter into the brave genius vs. uninspired stoner debate, though I will say that of the three stories, his was not my favorite. It doesn’t yet have a clear purpose; we know little about the characters, and as the story unfolds, we learn even less. But I think the larger question here is how we judge success within creative pursuits in this age of celebrity culture, overspecialization, and awards for effort.

Let us briefly journey back to the early sixteenth century, when Leonardo da Vinci was working simultaneously on the hazily gorgeous Virgin and Child with St. Anne and a series of anatomical drawings of fetuses within the womb. He was painting, he was dissecting, he was occasionally throwing pseudo-airplanes from the tops of Florentine towers. Did one of the Medici ever stop along the Ponte Vecchio to watch da Vinci practicing his hang glider and shout, “Leonardo, my friend! Stick to painting!” (Yes, possibly.) No one needed to give da Vinci permission to explore a dozen fields of inquiry—no permission should ever be needed, even today. But while anyone can sketch the ligaments in the human arm, only those who do it well—with artistry and accuracy—should be lauded. Da Vinci was just impossibly good at a ridiculous number of things.

In the range of human interest and engagement, there are two extremes to be avoided: the pedant and the dabbler. The former may well be a product of academia, squeezed through a graduate program that often prizes obscure specialization over broad, systemic knowledge. She can wax poetic on the galleons used in the War of Jenkins’ Ear (c. 1740) but will fail miserably if you ask her a “History” question from Trivial Pursuit and may not hold up well at a dinner party. The dabbler is not much more appealing; he hops among a dozen professions, not because he is electrified by life or striving to support a growing family, but because he feels compelled to “try everything out.” Maybe if he’s not great at this, he’ll be good at that.

As a fledgling writer and an ex-academic, let me tell you what little I know about writing: it supports neither pedants nor dabblers. I know of no (good) writers who consider this a temporary creative outlet, a passable way to acquire money or fame, a diversion. I also know of no (good) writers who shut themselves off from the world around them; writing thrives on an influx of information about human relationships, tidal patterns, butterfly diets, machine gun machinery, information which is absorbed and redirected like a laser into the craft itself. Writing requires expansive focus.

Which brings us back to James Franco and his—presumably—decapitated pig, cat statues, and mangled deer leg. I always admire people who write, regardless of style or skill, for writing is difficult and illuminating. I admire people who want to strain their experiences through a creative sieve. I don’t know Franco, and I’m not sure what drove him from the skewed and lucrative life of celebrity into graduate programs, writing classes, directing seminars, and art galleries. I suspect he may be in pursuit of something that’s inherently personal. I hope for him, as I hope for all artists, that he succeeds in mastering one or more of his endeavors (don’t get me wrong; 127 Hours was amazing) and therein finds some fulfillment. Curiosity is one of our most self-sustaining—and charming—qualities. Curiosity propels us from the world we know into ones we don’t. It should be coaxed up in all of us, movie star and street kid alike. If Borges wanted to sketch animals in pen and ink and Jewel wanted to write poems about her Alaskan childhood, I’m all for it. As John Updike said of artistic cross-pollination, “The impulse is one.”

But the question is not, “Should James Franco Be Allowed to Write and Act and Paint and Dance Unclothed,” but “Does James Franco Deserve to Be in Ploughshares?” Based on this story, perhaps not. But I don’t think Franco stole into the Ploughshares offices under cover of night, crawled under a desk, and then pounced on the fiction editor unawares, knife in hand. The fault lies not with Franco (who is certainly wavering on the spectrum toward dabbler but is not yet convicted) but with—goldarnit—America, which consumes celebrities with every meal like vitamins. Franco is not propelling himself into headlines with ruthless arm-twisting but is being tracked at every turn because he is physically compelling, has starred in movies, is bathed in the copper sheen of Hollywood. And so we follow his daily movements, obsess over his education, stare at his artwork, devour his stories. There may be merit here, of course, but, unfortunately for Franco, there is something larger than merit at play here, and while it offers him exposure, it prevents his work from being evaluated on its own terms, unburdened by his face and name.

As Giorgio Vasari observed of da Vinci, fifty years after the original Renaissance Man’s death, “Occasionally, in a way that transcends nature, a single person is marvelously endowed by Heaven with beauty, grace and talent in such abundance that . . . all his actions seem inspired.” Does Franco possess this otherworldly bounty? No, but he’s trying—as we all are, in varying degrees—and we cannot blame him for a culture-scape that is both invasive and fawning or for our own inexplicable fascination with beautiful people. May we all do what we love. My hopes are, simply, that we read stories for themselves rather than for their authors and that James Franco finds what he’s looking for.

—Katy Smith, Bennington Writing Seminars

Perhaps where writing is concerned, the line between good and bad is a fuzzy one, not to be drawn by any one arbiter. For now, though, critics and writers alike seem to be in agreement that Franco has a long way to go. What our three participants also agree on, though, is that it’s as much his right to write as anyone else’s.

I feel really lucky to be talking to you this week, because I know you started recording a new album on Tuesday. I did, yeah. Totally.

Are you back in Nevada City for that? No, I’m in Portland.

Oh, that’s interesting. Is this the first album you’ve recorded in Portland? Well, I started recording To Be Still in Portland, but then I did most of it down in Nevada City at my dad’s studio. So this is kind of the first one that I’m really going to be doing here, which is nice.

Is that a really different experience? So far, yeah. I’m liking it because I’m at home and I can just kind of go over there and it’s just not a big ordeal. It’s not like I’m having to really plan two weeks at a time to be down there and be recording. It’s much more leisurely because I live here. And so we’re just going to book some dates here and there and just take it really kind of casual.

When Alela Diane & Wild Divine was released, you said in several interviews that you wanted a bigger sound and you wanted to be the frontwoman in a band. But from the photo you posted on Facebook and from the comments there, it seems like this is going to be more of a return to the minimal sound of you and your guitar. It seems like that’s what’s happening, and it’s always interesting. I did want to be in a band, and I needed to try doing that. And it was awesome, and it was awesome through the last tour, and I really enjoyed doing that. But I started writing new songs, and they weren’t band songs. And there was nothing that I could do about that. And it just became very obvious that the songs were really delicate, and really just wanting to kind of be left alone in a lot of ways. So I think it’s important to recognize that, and just treat the songs that way. It wasn’t really a conscious decision, it was more just like, Oh, OK, well, these songs are really pretty sad. (Laughs.) I wasn’t playing a lot of guitar on the last record, and I just, I don’t know, something happened and I kind of just started getting back to my roots and pushing myself to try new things on the guitar. It’s just what ended up happening and it really took me by surprise, but I think it’s important to just kind of roll with it. And I think that my fans would appreciate that as well. People have kind of gone along with me on my journey to experience different sounds and try new things. But at the same time I’ve gotten a lot of feedback that says people really enjoy my music when it’s really delicate and when it’s just me and the guitar. So there’s something to be said for that.

And how does it feel to get back to the guitar? It’s really nice. I think that I needed some distance from it. It’s been good. Last year when we were touring, I was still playing guitar. We were playing older songs in there. There was a handful of the songs on the last record that were being driven by my guitar-playing. So I was really in practice just from having toured a lot last year. And it was nice to start writing on the guitar again, because most of the last record I worked a lot on the piano, even though I don’t really play piano. But it was more of a tool to kind of find chords. So it’s good to be back on the guitar.

How do working on the piano and the guitar differ? I find different things on each instrument. With the piano, it’s just kind of all laid out. And so all of the notes are just sitting there in front of you and you can kind of figure out where to go based on that. But the guitar is—for me at least—a lot more mysterious. Because I don’t really have a background in music theory. I really don’t know what I’m doing in technical terms. So with the guitar, it’s much more intuitive, or it’s just kind of like stumbling upon things that I think sound nice.

Something else you said on Facebook was that this album would be a collection of “melancholy songs that reflect on the past decade” and you also just said that these are delicate songs. Is it too early in the album’s life to talk about that, or can you give me a sense of what you were thinking about when you wrote these songs? Well, without going too much into detail, it’s just a time in my life of—basically, I realized I graduated from high school, this will be my ten-year, I think there’s going to be a reunion or something, I doubt I’m gonna go, but it’s like, Whoa, it’s been ten years since I’ve been on my own and kind of been an adult. And I got to thinking about that and I wrote a lot of the lyrics while we were touring. I just started thinking about all these really bizarre things that have happened in my life in the past ten years, and just different weird summers or just little glimpses of moments that are very long gone now, but kind of reflecting on those and writing about them. So half of the songs are kind of that vibe of really digging deep and going back to, like, Oh yeah, that really sucked when my heart got broken the first time. Like, I’m over it now, but, wow, just thinking about that is intense, and, you know, writing about it or whatever. And then, currently in my life, things are definitely in flux and I really have no idea what’s going on. I’ve been writing about that. I’ve been writing about what’s going on currently. And without letting the cat out of the bag completely, ‘cause I really don’t know what’s going on in my life, it’s a really intense, weird time of transition. And so there’s a lot of songs that are kind of just me processing that whole intensity of, like, Wow, I don’t know what the fuck’s going on. OK. (Laughs.) So yeah, the songs are kind of heavy. They’re sad. They’re full of very intimate and confessional and—it’s just kind of putting it all out there. So it’s a little scary, actually. (Laughs.)

That also sounds exciting. Yeah, totally.

Does your music career occupy a big space in these songs, or are they really about change and relationships? Yeah, it’s more personal changes and really taking a good look at myself and my life and what I want in my life and where I’m going. There’s a lot of things that are probably changing, feel like they’re changing. It’s just a transitional time and it’s pretty heart-wrenching. So I’ve been processing all of that through writing songs, which when I first started writing songs that’s what I would do as well. When I was twenty is when I started writing songs and during that time, my parents were getting a divorce and I had moved out on my own for the first time and all of those really intense life changes are what had initially caused me to start writing songs. So it’s a very different time now but it feels very similar to that time of big changes happening and using songwriting as a way to kind of get it off my chest or process it.

That’s really interesting. So you’re sort of going full circle, in some way. Yeah, totally. Yeah. Weird. (Laughs.)

This sort of goes back to what we were talking about before, recording in Portland. I saw in another interview that when you record in your father’s studio in Nevada City you uncover the window to connect with nature and the outdoors. I was wondering what sort of conditions you look for when you’re writing songs, if you have any particular needs or spaces that you like to work in. Well, for me writing usually happens kind of unexpectedly. Like I don’t have some little regimen where I have a place I go and I write, or something. It’s more like I write when something crazy is making me feel crazy and I need to write about it. And I’ve found that I write a lot more while I’m on tour. Not simply because there’s so much weird time when you’re sitting there and there’s nothing to do. I actually write a lot while we’re traveling. While we’re driving in the van I sit in the backseat with my laptop and think about shit. And there’s nothing else to do except look out the window at the world going by and stop at a gas station every hundred and fifty miles or whatever. So I write a lot more when we’re touring and that’s because I’m totally isolated from my life and my distractions as far as what’s going on at home. ‘Cause here I have friends, and I have things to do, and there’s a house that needs to be cleaned, and there’s all of these things that I could be doing. But on tour I’ve just got my suitcase. And obviously, the band has been around in the van, but you can’t just sit and talk to people all day long. People get a little bit introspective and quiet when you’re traveling. ‘Cause there’s just so many hours where you’re just sitting there. So I’ve used that time to write. And it’s kind of nice looking out the window and seeing all these different countries go by. I guess that’s inspiring, just being in motion and being reminded of weird things because of what you see out the window and then kind of seeing where it takes you. So that’s that’s where I wrote most of the words. And I’ve written a handful of the songs, or the words at least, at home. But mostly it was in the tour van. And then I wrote the music and the melodies once I got back home, because on tour there’s not really personal space to go find a sanctuary to be writing a song and singing some weird thing. ‘Cause writing a song, the singing part and the musical part, is a very personal process, and if there’s people around, it just doesn’t happen as easily. So I had all of my words very put together before I got home and once I got here it was like, Oh, wow, I just wrote ten songs in six days. It was really crazy how quickly it happened once I got home. And I think it’s because I put so much energy into the words that they were just dying to come out, and I hadn’t had the opportunity to let that happen until I got home. So it happened pretty quickly.

And you said you had a laptop. Do you type your songs? Yeah, totally. Because in the van, it’s like, how do you have a steady hand? Also, I find—it’s so modern to do that, it’s really silly—but on the computer, I get very organized, and if I’m writing a song by hand, I’ll have to keep rewriting it every time I change one word. On the computer, every time you change a word, you just delete the word and put the new word in and it’s all very organized and I can see what I have going on. Whereas with a piece of paper it just turns into this chaotic place of crossing stuff out and trying to find the space to write what you actually want to say. So I have been typing because it’s easier to change things along the way and let it become what you really want it to be or work on it until it’s like, Oh, yeah, those are the words I want to use. And it’s just here in front of me and there’s not this record of destruction, or a record of all of the stupid words I said before I said that one. (Laughs.)

I’m also interested in your other creative outlets. I know you do a lot of crafting, like that really beautiful gift-wrapping [of records bought by fans] you did over the holidays. I outdo myself sometimes. I don’t do that that often, you know, things like that. I have it in me, and when I do it, I do enjoy doing it. That project of gift-wrapping those CDs, that took ages. And I was just like, Oh God, how’d I get myself into this, this is crazy. But it’s so nice to be able to do that stuff. I enjoy being able to use my hands in ways that make beautiful things that people will appreciate and put my heart and soul into things. I totally love doing that. And lately, I would say my main creative outlet is really just making house and making this place awesome and decorating and just organizing it—refinishing doors and that sort of thing, just making the space I live in as awesome as it could be, and really valuing that. So most of my visual, kind of crafty handiwork has been going into the house as of late, which is a lot of hard work, but it’s fun.

Do you think that there’s any relation between how you approach the house and building things and making crafts to how you approach writing and creating songs? I think that it all comes from the same kind of thing inside me that makes me want to create. It’s part of my fire, my personality—that’s something that I really value. I like creating beautiful things. I like making the space nice. I think it’s definitely connected. And with my music, once I have a record or whatever, I put a lot of personal energy into the record sleeves and to the visual aspects of what I put out there to the world. I’ve always pretty much designed all of the record covers and done all of that, so I’ve definitely used my artistic stuff to kind of go along with the music, or visually represent the music.

Do you feel like you have a sense of what you want the record cover to look like as you’re coming up with the album? It kind of depends. Sometimes it happens easier. But last time, the record cover didn’t come together until the very last minute. I had this whole other vision of what it was gonna look like and then it became clear that that wasn’t the right idea. And I had this woman come and take photographs and that made everything come together. And then all the other ideas just built off the photographs that we had, and it became clear all of a sudden. And then it was like, Oh, yeah, this was the right choice, because the cover and the whole visual aspect of that new record in a lot of ways also relates to what To Be Still looks like. They all kind of flow together. The aesthetic is consistent enough, I think.

It’s a great photo. Thank you. It was funny because it was just the photo that came out that was the most different than all of the pictures she had taken. And it was a Polaroid, and she just snapped it real quick in my bathroom. And we looked at it and was like, Whoa, that’s a really crazy picture. Think that might be the album cover. So I have the original Polaroid of it, and it was just one of the photos that randomly happened.

You’ve mentioned in other interviews that you don’t read much, but I know, thanks to Twitter, that you were reading on Tuesday before going into the studio. So have you been reading more recently? Kind of one of my new year’s resolutions, actually—I’m like, you know what, I’m kind of sick of stagnation and feeling like I’m not learning anything. I’ve just been in this mode for a few years of not taking in a lot of outside information. And I bought a bunch of classic books, and so I’ve started by reading those. And it’s fun. I’m reading Kurt Vonnegut right now, which I just started. Cat’s Cradle. But it’s funny to try and make time for reading. I should probably just cancel the internet at my house. But we’ll see.

It can be hard. It can, yeah. There’s just so many distractions. And also when I’ve been touring, my dad always brings tons of Louis L’Amour novels, which are these old country western books, which are just like—every one is almost the same. There’s some cowboy character and then there’s some beautiful woman he’s after and he’s riding a horse across the desert and he’s out of water. The plotline of every one of the books is very, very similar, but it’s just someone else’s story, so on tour we would just read tons of those books, because they’re really easy to read. They’re quick reads, and you’re always like, Oh, what’s gonna happen? Are the Indians gonna kill him now? (Laughs.)

That’s kind of perfect for your music, though. Yeah, it’s true. I think that’s why I kind of have always had a place in my heart for western stuff. I think it’s because of the town I grew up in. It’s just a gold mining town and I’m always really fascinated by American history and the pioneers and all of that stuff. That’s why I like old western novels.

Well, actually, I know you get asked about Nevada City a lot, but I have to ask about it because I grew up in Sacramento [about an hour away]. I’m curious what kind of distinct identity Nevada City has for you, and how you think about it in relation to the rest of California. Are your songs—these songs that are sort of explicitly about the hills and the rivers—are they about Nevada City or do you think they’re about California in a bigger way? I think Nevada City. A lot of things that I’ve written about are comparisons to nature, and that sort of thing, I think, is rooted in Nevada City specifically, and that part of California, because that’s my place. That’s what I grew up knowing. And so those are the visual things I think of. But there’s definitely a place in my heart for greater California, for the whole thing that California is. But at the same time, I’m really glad I moved to Portland. So, I don’t know. But I do think that growing up in Nevada City—it was just a really interesting, bizarre place to be raised—the schools, and the people in the community, there was just a lot of support for the arts. I think so many kids who were raised there were kind of raised up believing you could just pursue art, you could do this thing that you loved and try and make it doing that—‘cause the community was supportive of that, and everyone had musician parents. I think a lot of other places in the world, children don’t think that they can do that. They’re bred to think that they have to go to college and become a businessman or whatever. (Laughs.) But that’s not what I got growing up. So I think that that has definitely influenced my choices, and what I’ve chosen to do, and just influenced what the songs sound like, and what I sing about.

Right. Last Christmas I went up to Rough and Ready to the Fruit Jar Pickers’ bluegrass singalong. Have you been there? Well, I’ve been to Rough and Ready. But it was a festival, is that what you said?

It’s like a bluegrass breakdown-singalong that they do I think once a month. Oh, that’s awesome.

Are there a lot of opportunities like that in Nevada City? Well, it’s funny you mention that bluegrass scene, because that was something that was definitely a part of my childhood. Both my parents were in a bluegrass band when I was really little, and they played music with my friend Mariee [Sioux]’s dad, and he was in the bluegrass band, and that was just a very regular part of growing up with bluegrass music, and going to the bluegrass festival, and hearing that kind of old-timey music on the local radio station. That musical community is very alive in that area. And I definitely have a place in my heart for it.

I know you started songwriting and learning to play guitar when you were about nineteen. I started learning to play guitar at twenty-four, a few years ago, so I’m curious what advice you have for late-blooming musicians, especially those starting to write songs. Well, just keep doing it, because it does get easier. And even still, in the studio the other night I was just like, Oh God, I wish I was a better guitar player, this is frustrating because I’ll mess up or I can’t get a good take of a song. It’s like, I know I can play it, but I can’t necessarily play it perfectly. (Laughs.) And it’s just muscle memory. It’s practice. It’s super-frustrating when you are a late-bloomer, because there are so many people who have been playing since they were fourteen or something, and they’re really, really good guitar players. Just work with what you can do. And it’s OK to write really simple songs. It’s OK to play really basic stuff. It’s mostly the emotion you put into it and your conviction that matter, because there’s a lot of really good music where the guitar playing isn’t technical and isn’t really fancy or anything. So I always just try to keep that in mind, because I’m really not a very good guitar player. I can do a few things, but I can’t jam. I can’t join a group of people that’s playing a song and know how to play it. Yeah right. I can’t play a lead. But it doesn’t really matter. I guess just keep working at it and have friends teach you things, just show you things you don’t know and then practice that. And I think you just kind of keep getting better if you put time into it. That’s the idea, I guess.

That is reassuring. Yeah.

Listen to Alela Diane’s music on Spotify.

I have a yearly tradition (one I’m sure many people in my neighborhood share) of availing myself of the riches of the Columbia student evacuation. Every June, students from 110^th-125^th Street empty out their apartments, tossing everything from teapots to suitcases to beaten-up futons out onto the street. I tend to ignore most of it, but a few years ago, when a full-size bookshelf with double-glass doors appeared on the sidewalk outside my building, I immediately hauled it inside. My three existing bookcases were overflowing already, to the point where I had started wedging paperbacks underneath the bottom shelf to make room for new additions. There were books in literally every room in the apartment, on every surface, and I dreaded the prospect of whittling down to the essentials. After a week of sanding and a coat of thick glossy red paint, the new shelf was ready to go. It was slid into place beside my desk, and the stray novels and pop sociology publications were carefully shelved.

I stood back and felt a deep sense of satisfaction: if the books had a place, then none of them were unwanted. I then closed the glass doors, left the apartment, and headed straight to the bookstore. A few months later, once again, there were books everywhere, and nowhere to put them. And that’s when I had it. From then on, I have discarded almost every single one of my new reads.

The compulsion to hold onto one’s books has been well-documented by now. Jonathan Ames wrote lovingly about his own sloppy collection of papers and reading materials, which he called “kipple” in honor of Philip K. Dick’s self-reproducing enormous pile of junk. He defends his book-based kipple, saying, “I simply add these young books to the piles that surround me, like prison bars, penning me in but also keeping me safe from the coming bookless world.” It’s a fair defense, and I fear a world where, upon walking into someone’s home, I have no shelves full of well-thumbed titles to consult. How will I judge them if I can’t tell what they read? But Ames seems to be fine with accumulating to no end—even those titles that mean nothing to him. Even those galleys he will never get to read, he keeps. As insulation.

For anyone that loves books, it has become a universal truth that they will pile up much faster than they will be read. Sure, we can all dream about the fantasy library that we’ll someday have when we make our first million, but inevitably one will find themselves underneath a pile of toppled copies, wondering how we let it get this bad. And worst of all, the books that will bury us may not even be good books. Instead, they are usually comprised of one-quarter recommendations from friends, one-quarter prestige books (books we feel we should’ve read instead of the Tina Fey memoir), one-quarter well-loved tomes so broken that they can’t be held, and one-quarter novels that were hot in 2006 but never once made a mental comeback. Culling any part of this collection feels like cutting away a part of oneself…and yet to leave the books intact feels like a lie, a never-ending form of procrastination. You say to yourself, Someday, I will be the type of person to finish all of these books, and their physical presence continues to remind you that, no, you never will. And the nagging voice goes ever on, reminding you that somewhere, out in the world, there is someone who would be reading this faster and more passionately than you. Someone who would truly give this book a better home. Remember, as the brilliant Linda Holmes conceded, culling is the choosing you do for yourself.

And so kill the nagging voice in your head—give away your books. They do no good sitting unread. Is a book still unread after two years of purchase? If you look at it with deep affection, let it stay. But if it provokes nothing but a sense of obligation, give it away. (Yes, even if it’s a classic, and even if it’s something you should’ve read long ago. This is how I ultimately broke up with Infinite Jest.) How often was it read? Even though I read it years ago, I will never throw out my copy of Heartburn, in case there’s a night where I can’t bear to start something new and all I need is a good laugh. Is it worn out? Unless it bears nostalgic marginalia (fastidious notes from your undergrad days, inscriptions from loved ones), either replace it with a new clean copy or give it away. And do all of this to make room for new books, for new energy that you can recycle back towards new stories.

Most importantly, give the books away to people, not to garbage bins. Give them to friends at housewarming parties, to your neighbors, to your colleagues. Abandon them in airplane information pockets, subway seats, under park benches during warm weather seasons. Give them to worthy organizations that put them in desiring hands like Books Behind Bars, ReLit NY, any branch of Housing Works, or any local library or school that values your donations. Bring them to our book swap tonight at the KGB Bar, and watch how excited other people get by what you didn’t want. (And no, it’s not just the booze talking–they really are that excited.) One reader’s trash is another reader’s treasure.

So yes, there’s my defense. I may abandon my books to the public, but I think that’s way better than abandoning them due to apathy. Don’t let your unread books fester and collect dust. Give them good homes. Make sure they’re read, no matter who reads them.

Please join us this Thursday, January 26th, for a book swap at KGB Bar (85 E. 4th St., b/w Bowery and 2nd Ave.), beginning at 7 pm, and celebrate– however belatedly– our relaunch with us. Come with a book (or several) that you’ve read but no longer want to keep, and swap with your fellow book fiends for something new to stimulate your reading palate. While you browse and barter, enjoy cheap drinks, free baked goods courtesy of [tk], and, of course, scintillating company. All leftover books will be donated to Housing Works or Books Through Bars, as appropriate.

Any writers interested in attending can pitch us pieces in person! We’ll be listening.

See you soon!