Working on my assigned chapter of “Landscape and Legacy,” the book that John Vollertson is editing, has me surveying writing and writers along this east slope of the Rockies. Partly I’m wondering whom to include. There are the usual suspects, of course, Guthrie, Walker, Howard -- but there are also a few I’d like to set fire to, like R.L. Lancaster, that reprobate whose book everyone loves in that unreasonable white-man [sic] way because it fulfills the stereotype they cherish. (If I say more, I might be sued for libel even though he’s dead and what I say is all true.) Then I look through my bookshelves and begin to realize how many small homemade local books there are, and I come up against the question of whether I myself should be in this chapter. If I put in Lancaster’s “Piegan,” don’t I need to put in “Bronze Inside and Out: a Biographical Memoir of Bob Scriver” who was very much an east slope person all his life?
In the book I tell the stories of Bob and I hunting up Blackleaf Canyon and on Two Moons, Guthrie’s ranch. Guthrie divorced about the time I met Bob and remarried about the time Bob divorced me, so there’s an inverse relationship of some kind. When we were hunting on his land (chaperoned by a lawman) Guthrie was in a very bad patch and might not have cared if he’d known. I once had the task of helping out some videographers who wanted to get Guthrie on tape -- this was in the mid-eighties -- and asked me to be the stooge who asked questions from off-camera. They gave me the questions. But Guthrie and I chatted a bit and when he realized who I was, he had some eye-brow wiggling about how Bob got any sculpture done when he was busy with so many women. I told him the truth: Bob put us all to work on the sculpture. Or sometimes a little writing. The first real lesson about writing, the hardest one I ever had, was composing the captions for the miniature wildlife dioramas in the museum. They had to be vivid, factual, simply said, and memorable. Not quite poetry. I don’t suppose they survive.
I always wanted to be a writer but never understood how a person went about it. Ivan Doig, who was in my class of ’57 at Northwestern, chose journalism and history but somehow that didn’t work for me. I went for theatre. I kept a journal for Alvina Krause, intense and effective acting coach, and wrote in it that I was never bored. She was outraged! She said that when she read that, she was so incensed that she threw my binder against the ceiling! Not being bored meant that I had nothing to DO !! Why didn’t I get BUSY?? I paid no attention to her. I’m not a doer. I watch. (I got a bad grade in acting class, but I really learned a lot.) Part of it is a matter of not revealing myself, but even more is about so much going on in my head that I didn’t want to be distracted.
When I bought this little shanty in Valier and moved here to write, I had very little notion what that meant, except that I’d saved boxes and boxes of material I thought might be useful. Tear-outs, manuscripts, scribbled notes on café napkins, old albums, paper in many forms. What I thought would ensue eventually was “being published,” which I took to be some mysterious process that would leave me rich and honorable.
Forget it. In the next decade the Brit/European/Jewish Manhattan yoke was shattered. Suddenly no one knew what to do except make money. NOW who were the people who called the shots? Scramblers who lunched. The publishers, their attending agents, the newspapers that supported critics, the academics who tucked extra feathers into their nests by saying who was good and who was bad (which had a mysterious relationship to “naughty and nice”), the bookstores (the big chains that had just gotten through destroying all the local indie bookstores) -- and even the readers-- vanished without leaving so much as a pile of rubble.
Now that our eyes are beginning to adjust, we see a whole new world in which authors deal directly with readers -- if they can find each other -- and there are what claim to be publishers everywhere, but we’re all sort of feeling around in the dark with little ebook flashlights, except for those who long ago jumped ship for sophisticated videos with music and links. (There was a momentary period of time when we talked about “vooks,” which were supposed to be books with vids in them, but, whish, they zoomed on by.)
And we’re going crazy over content. What is “true?” What is “obscene?” What is privileged? What is good writing now? Talk to me, baby! You’re audible! Tell me some secrets! I want to be shocked!
There was another moment when people were writing extremely short stories, the equivalent of haiku. I’ve forgotten what we were calling the category. The Asian ones were very emotional. Mine were little juxtapositions of shifted consciousness. On the computer I printed up about a hundred quarter-page, yarn-bound sets of them. One cousin bought a dozen to give as Christmas presents. I made some other home-printed and bound booklets -- one about iniskum (buffalo stones) but they did NOT sell. It was an organic funky-looking little half-page buckskin-colored pamphlet that only an anthropologist could love. Those guys don’t come around anymore. Tourists want bright and slick.
I bought a $350 wire binding machine and made 400 copies of a computer-printed short bio of Bob Scriver with a slick photo cover. They occasionally show up on Amazon and so does the book of prairie sermons called “Sweetgrass and Cottonwood Smoke” published conventionally by the Moosemilk Press, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Unitarian Church of Edmonton. Then my binding machine broke and I discovered Lulu.com.
THAT’s when I found out what publishing is about: money. Lulu.com is print-on-demand which solves both the problems of needing manufacturing money up front and the problem of storage. But Lulu.com is NOT a publisher, which is a selling endeavor: locating readers, pitching to them, distributing, building up a clientele and a platform as though selling Popeil universal fishing rods. Lulu.com expects the author to do that. Or contract with someone. Money up front. All my Lulu.com books show up on Amazon and Google, but that is not enough to make money from writing. So am I or am I not a published writer? The public thinks publication is like a college degree: a certificate of achievement of some kind. But they have no idea what publishing is. The writers’ associations always considered having published a book as the dividing line between professional and amateur. Not any more.
And no one can figure out blogging. Especially long-form blogging. You’re lookin’ at it, baby. It’s up to you to decide whether it’s “good” or not. Even what the proper context might be.
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