WHAT'S THAT YOU WRITE??

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.

PUBLISHING FROM A WRITER'S EYE VIEW

Every writer must have the NEED to write and the WILL to write and the ABILITY to write. A lot of people want to “be” a writer without writing. Forget it. But today “writing” can mean creating narrative or image or spoken words, or a mix -- not necessarily lines of print. Check out Tim Barrus on Facebook for examples. He has been a writer, a photographer, performer and voracious reader for many years. This is deliberately, consciously, short-form visual poetic narrative never possible to publish until recently. Not everyone has the chops for it. There were no major expenses except Tim’s time and talent. He owns the camera and downloads free music. They call it New Media.

To “publish” in the former print sense of the word takes investment capital (money) because it means actually making a big pile of the books. The publisher either thinks there is a way to market the product that will earn a profit or thinks the work is enough of a contribution to the world that it is worth funding as a gift. The printing cost of my book, “Bronze Inside and Out,” was paid by a grant from an organization that supports lifting up people who made a contribution to Alberta. The return on that investment will simply pay the staff’s wages and the expenses of the office. There will be little if any financial return for the writer, because this is an academic press where it is assumed that the author’s reward will be in terms of contributing to his or her career in the academic world. I did not understand any of this.

Facebook publishing does not provide advertising, promotion or any other active agenting. (The agent is the person who acts on behalf of the author to find connections that can lead to profit -- although lately there has been a shift to the agent who looks for writers on behalf of the publisher, almost exclusively from a commercial point of view. My book was suggested to the press by a woman who had a contract to find stories about outstanding people.) The University of Calgary Press listed my book in their catalog, made it available through a wholesaler, bought several ads in “Montana, the Magazine of Montana History,” and distributed many review copies which resulted in two or three reviews, a very nice interview with George Cole on Yellowstone Public Radio (you can find the interview if you Google), and a signing event at the Russell Auction with a dozen other authors. About half the edition of 750 has been sold.

The breakaway editors who have become “agents” have been followed by breakaway businesses that contract to promote books. Otherwise the writer must do it. Some writers with money will pay promoters in addition to what the publisher pays. A Montana publisher once told about an author, an older woman, who was determined to promote her book and was reading at an outdoor microphone on a cold rainy day, shaking with cold, determined to sell her book. He said he admired her so much. I should think so -- essentially she was making money for her publisher! But she thought she was doing what writers are supposed to do because they believe in their work.

Authors are now asked to submit a plan for promotion and an explanation of their platform, tasks previously performed by the publisher or possibly the agent. They are asked to submit an index, illustrations, the necessary permissions to quote, possibly even to format or pay for that specialized job to be done, and to round up flattering quotes for the cover. All of these were once part of the publishers task. Some publishers charge a “reading fee” for accepting manuscripts to their slush pile, usually about equivalent to what it used to cost to mail a paper manuscript. Now, of course, the slush pile is electronic.

Most writers are not very good at “publishing” because they throw every bit of strength and intelligence into the actual writing which is a different skill. It’s a bit like asking a dancer to make the costumes, play the music, and operate the lights as well as dancing. But most writers CAN manage to post their work on the Internet. They will simply have to make their living doing something else -- which means less time and energy for writing. Bob Scriver acted as his own foundry and gallery -- the equivalent of publishing -- which meant he could pay the bills but his work dwindled.

On the internet two immense streams of information and advice are now running in parallel. One is about the actual writing: all sorts of technical advice about how to develop plot, illustrate character, punctuate dialogue, think of images and so on. The other is advice for writers about marketing, either stuff about how to find a publisher (including the self-publishing alternatives) or find an agent or how to do the tasks oneself. The effort now is not to sell writing to the reader, but to sell advice to the WRITER -- because they are the ones with the greater craving.

The bright side of this is that all restrictions are gone. The passive restraints of scairdycat publishers or alleged potential commercial profits are gone. Experiments cost no more or less than tradition and writers doing their own “everything” are pressed into breakthroughs -- like Tim’s video-poems that are drawn from real life happening now. Are they journals, outcries, memoirs-of-just-yesterday, direct expressions of the heart, or something that doesn’t have a name yet? Since they come from the lives of a young multi-lingual community that lives with iPod earbuds dangling next to earrings, there is a lot of music and several languages. They travel so there is a lot of scenery.

People think of blogs as trivia or politics -- something mysterious and sort of dangerous. What I write is long-form daily essays, the same as I used to write as Sunday sermons. They are informal but often structured, sometimes researched, and occasionally illustrated with a photo from family albums or my own camera. It began as a way of organizing Blackfeet history for the tribe itself to read and then branched out into eulogies, theory, religious exploration, memoir, movie and book reviews, and natural history. I’ve made it a point to report on Valier, the village where I live. It’s interesting that people react to reading these blogs in a way they would not if they were in paper books or if the people were listening while sitting together as an audience.

Sometimes the reaction is not to the content at all, but simply to the fact that they exist, as though they were a product of some kind of privilege (being published) that is not justified. I think they are wondering what to think, afraid to have their own reaction, which is why they normally need a publisher, critics, and blurbs on the book jackets. They want to know why I have access and they don’t. (But they DO!) They need me to be authorized by someone. I hope the eventual result is the abandonment of authorization. Just AUTHOR. Why should someone be paid to set limits?

A DIRECTORY TO BOOKS BY MARY SCRIVER

The big puzzle now is how to get any specific printed matter. Never has so much been so available but not since early Gutenburg has it been so hard to find. This is because not only may the actual nature of the print range from paper to pixels, but also the gizmo on which you read may be anything from loose sheets to a cutting edge device requiring batteries, and you may be accessing videos mixed with print or spoken words with sound effects. Then there is the huge range of sources (many languages, beginning with children almost too young to spell, arcane academic works, pirated data, narcissistic chattering, and surreal poetry). The problem becomes not just where to find what you want, but how to conceive of what might be out there, in the famous phrase, “the unknowns you don’t know about.” Have you heard about the “number transmission” on ham radios that are presumably spy communication? Nothing but a detached voice reading a series of numbers.

An additional factor is that marketing systems have been radically -- I mean RADICALLY -- changed by electronics. Amazon, online remainder houses, online used book sources, are systematically wiping out the corner bookstore, but NOT the people in them who were living repositories of knowledge about books. Yet those people are not identifiably online to tell us what they know. They have been replaced by something called an “algorithm” which is a mathematical formula designed to sort information in some way more sophisticated than alphabetically or numerically (ISBN). Factors included are usually gender, age, income, education, what movies you’ve rented, what books you’ve already read or own, whether you have pets, where in the nation you live, whether you are city or country, what kind of food you eat, and so on. Then the factors might be weighted: more importance given to what college you attended (and what department you were in), less to what kind of car you drive. This is entirely from the point of view of the book marketer, whatever kind the book might be.

www.lulu.com , which prints for authors books on demand, produces a thousand books a day. It’s internal sorting is by subject and by staff recommendation. Powell’s, the huge bookstore in Portland, does the same thing. YouTube sorts by subject. Many smaller websites try to capture clients, both producers and consumers, by specializing in educational material or YA books. Sometimes work is grouped: “If you liked this, you might like that.”

Academic publishers have been slow to catch up, partly because codex bound books, adjudicated by peer review, have been an important way of sorting people instead of books. They are indicators for tenure. Also, they deal in journals as much as shelf books. People cling to the status quo because it means their jobs. Catching up with this is the number of websites like TED or The Edge, that present lectures in both video and manuscript. The university itself will be far more deeply affected by all this than they realize at present. It’s an auto-didact’s heaven. And a monopoly-smasher.

In the past small groups of certified elite entities or persons have been able to control publication and scholars’ work. They have sold access (books, lectures) as a way of financing themselves that did not depend on rich patrons who might or might be sympathetic, might or might not interfere with what was written. (No longer dukes and kings -- now international corporations.) This pattern applies both to small local historical societies and to mega-universities of enormous prestige and to Manhattan publishing cabals that have totally sold out to the marketing department, right down to synthesizing authors for ghosted works by hiring people to impersonate an author. Most of the public has not realized any of this, has had no reason to reflect on the consequences in their own lives.

From the point of view of the consumer, most of us would not know how to write an app (application) for an algorithm (though they tell us this is what we need to do) but soon there will be an app for an app that will do that. I will need several because I cruise a number of different categories from fMRI brain research to Blackfeet oil drilling transactions to the highland clearances in Scotland and so on. In the meantime Amazon and Netflix try to make their little “five star” ratings work and there are voluntary aggregators of readers who post their libraries in hopes of finding people with similar collections. (How many books do they have? It would take me a week to enter my books and few have bar codes, let alone ISBN numbers of even Library of Congress designations. And maybe -- like snoopers who want to find out what library books you have read -- some people will be far too interested in what I have.)

More important to me is the “publishing” of my writing, that reciprocal and synthesizing sort of book. I composed the appended list (which doesn’t include works in progress or works in file cabinets) according to what is formally published. Don’t expect anyone to come around to your place to beg you to buy them. Some are free. (The pdf’s about Blackfeet.)


MARY STRACHAN SCRIVER writes in various modes that must be accessed in various ways. She does not aggressively market. You must look for the books. Online is best. I have none of these books at my house. Here is some help:

STANDARD BOOKSTORE: “Bronze Inside and Out: A Biographical Memoir of Bob Scriver” was published by the University of Calgary Press. It is acquired from any bookstore that has standard wholesale access or can be acquired from the academic wholesaler at Michigan State University Press. (msupress@msu.edu) If you Google you can find it at Amazon and other sources, sometimes for a discount. I have to buy these books myself.

SELF-PUBLISHED (Sometimes called “Nahpi-Yahki Press,” which means “White Woman Press”) books are available in two modes from www.lulu.com/prairiemary. You can download some pdf’s for free, or you can buy the books conventionally bound through the internet. They will come to you by mail. Since these are printed on demand, I do not have a supply of them. Many of the books are Blackfeet history.

OTHER SMALL PRESSES: A book of my prairie sermons was published by the Edmonton First Unitarian Church dba “Moosemilk Press.” This book, “Sweetgrass and Cottonwood Smoke,” was remaindered. All the copies left are available through Driftwillow Press in Great Falls. http://driftwillowpress.com 725 4th Ave. S. , Great Falls, MT 59405, Phone: 406-453-0685, Fax: 406-453 0276

I write a thousand-word essay every morning for www.prairiemary.blogspot.com
Occasionally I post items of interest to Bob Scriver fans to www.scriverart.blogspot.com.
I write with Tim Barrus, who publishes print and video on Facebook, but what I write with him does not appear on Facebook nor does it show up on Google. It is often poetry.

THIRTY YEARS OF THE BLOOMSBURY REVIEW

For all those who despair that they can’t find reviews of anything but best-sellers and big-push Manhattan stuff, this is what to look for. Thirty years old this year, this newsprint bimonthly located in Denver might be named for the Virginia Woolf Bloomsbury group, but there is nothing specifically Brit about them. They are both regional and eclectic, one foot in the counterculture and one foot in grad school.

They make me mad. Not really angry, but frustrated, because I’ve never really figured out how to interface with them. I LOVE reading the review and go through it carefully every time it comes. I boost it as much as I can on this blog. But I don’t really connect with these people somehow. I don’t know why and I don’t know why it should even matter anyway.

Jim Hepworth is the only one I know personally. I took a class from him at Fishtrap Writing Conference which was fun and valuable and he praised me in an encouraging way. It was about Stegner’s “Angle of Repose” and I had prepared as though I were a grad student -- with one difference. The book is about the impossibility of reconciling an Eastern educated woman with a Western man of the land. At one point she has gone home to the east, while he stays on the land as an engineer. A mounted elk head, yes, taxidermy, is hanging in the barn and it’s a good job. She’s out there and for a moment it seems to come to life. This showed that she DID love the West. I said that.

Everyone sat there staring. They all KNEW that taxidermy is a “bad thing,” that it kills, that it’s false, that it’s politically incorrect. But I’d spent a decade with Bob Scriver living with taxidermy. It has a LOT of meaning to me, none very typical. Jim finally said, “In all the years I’ve been teaching this book NO ONE has ever said that before.” I was proud and gratified. But I was OUT. I did not fit. Our experiences did not match. They were irreconcilable, like Stegner’s parents.

For a while in the subsequent years when I was driving back and forth between the prairies and Portland, OR, I’d pull up in front of Hepworth’s house -- usually at some ungodly hour like 5AM -- and sit at the curb in the dawn light for a while to see whether anyone might show signs that they were up. There was never any sign so I’d move on. That’s the way it mostly is with me and publishing. I never did go back to Fishtrap writing center at Wallowa Lake. They’re an initiated group who love to sit around a bonfire and roar out songs while swilling beer. At least that’s my mental image. I’m not loose enough.

I sort of see the Bloomsbury Review the same way: an NGO of great value and generosity, much bon homie and bonding, but not for me as a participant. They don’t accept my reviews, they didn’t review my book, “Bronze Inside and Out.” Probably have no idea it exists. They know about this blog, I think. I copy them when I talk about them.

Both the attraction of literature and what I might call “the repellancy of literature” is that we all learned in school that it’s a charmed circle. I’m not talking about the commercial goo and greed of Manhattan. I mean something more like a religious denomination where everyone knows the hymns and order of service. Environmental groups are like that. Bloomsbury loves environmental groups. Religion, too, but only if it’s not Christian, mostly.

So many of the books they do review are exactly what I’m looking for. For a long time they were the only trustworthy reviewers of Native American books. (By now the NA’s are writing for each other and are not reviewable for this audience.) They were interviewing Gary Snyder and Wendell Berry before anyone else knew they existed.



Take a look at this list of advertisers’ websites. Very useful. Little guys, going along full of hope and ideas. Boomers. Bloomsbury Review is on Facebook and will soon have a website: www.bloomsburyreview.com. Still boomers. The gray ponytail crowd has found the Internet. The website has advice for people who would like their book to be reviewed. The advice is: 1. send the book and 2. don’t expect anything. So should I hustle around to buy a copy of my own book (I’m out of review copies) to send? Naw. I think I’ll just sit here and pout. What difference would it make? I mean REALLY what difference would it make.

The advertisers in Bloomsbury Review have always included a lot of “regional” academic presses plus some other high grade publishers. I see that they are shifting around. U of Oklahoma Press is missing. Texas took the whole back page. Kansas, New Mexico, Nebraska, Arizona and California are in. Montana has no university press. Montana small publishers create pretty tourist books. Montana is where writers and movie actors come to be ignored. We DO read when we’re snowed in.

Bloomsbury is about the English pattern of “printing” with machinery, not even an iPod. That’s okay. Why should I get all shook up about it? Tim is on a roll this morning, “preaching” about the relationship between social class and books, the American accumulations of books simply piling onto their other mounds of things to own and drag around the country in 18-wheelers or leave in storage units until the rent on them can’t be paid so the books and Christmas ornaments and grandma’s old rocker all go to auction. (With the occasional murder victim.) How publshers are de facto censors.

The English pattern of printed publishing is a capital-based pattern. One must have money -- universities used to have money. Professors, before they were dispersed into adjuncts, came close to being landed (tenured) gentry and what counted in that context was your advisor, who was a patron who could get you grants and positions and a published book. Now that the money is gone, the books have gone as well. What we see on our iPads and Nookies is our consolation. They ARE our professors now. Backpack professors. Who needs a university anymore? Corporations. Quickly sell your stock in textbook companies.

I hope The Bloomsbury Review travels into that virtual world. It has lasted thirty years now. Read it while you still can. On Facebook. www.bloomsburyreview.com.