SLC.edu / Magazine / Fall 2003 Issue / Producing Creativity / Storytellers

Storytellers

It sounds like a riddle: How many people does it take to bring a book from the writer’s hands to yours? But the answer is no joke—it takes a lot of them. Each needs to be able to re-tell the story the author has woven, crafting and shaping it to suit the market.They’re as much tailors as tellers. They’re also entrepreneurs, prognosticators, gamblers, shepherds, confessors, analysts, builders, dreamers, aesthetes and philosophers. They heed the bottom line, and they love a good book.

The Agent

Literary agent Jennifer Lyons ’83 describes herself as a shepherd. Her job description: guiding writers along the complex route a manuscript travels on its way to becoming a book. But it isn’t just a matter of brokering a single book deal for a writer, says Lyons, who is director of the Joan Daves Agency at Writers House in New York City, where she is also a senior agent.

“What I do,” she says, “is help navigate a writer’s career. Like most creative people, they don’t focus on business issues. Their heads are someplace else.” Lyons’ roster of more than 100 clients includes Elizabeth Holtzman, John Maclean, Melvin Jules Bukiet ’74 (who also teaches writing at Sarah Lawrence) and April Reynolds ’97. Lyons also represents the estates of Isaac Babel, Frank O’Connor and Heinrich Böll, among others.

Lyons may have a genetic predisposition to life in the book world. She learned about the business from her publisher father, Nick Lyons, who founded the boutique firm Lyons Press in the 1970s; brother Tony Lyons is now editor-in-chief of the Press. Her broad knowledge of the field has made her sensitive to an author’s uncertainty about the rocky terrain of publishing and to the particular brand of nervousness felt by young writers. “It’s uncharted territory for them,” Lyons says. “They don’t know what to expect from an editor, or what a publisher should be for them.”

April Reynolds, a former student of Bukiet’s who, herself, is teaching this year at Sarah Lawrence, is one of those new writers. Her first novel, Knee-Deep in Wonder, was just published this fall under the Metropolitan imprint of Henry Holt & Co. It’s a story about four generations of fear and longing in the deep South.

“April is a lyrical Faulknerian writer who tells a great story,” Lyons says. “But when she came to me, she was a young and new and raw talent, and she didn’t know how to proceed. I found the right match, an editor with whom she would have a good relationship, and a publisher.”

Being an effective literary agent—one who advances the creative process on a number of different fronts—requires a combination of strengths. For Lyons, it’s a fusion of skills in publicity and sales, a love of new ideas and literature, a long list of major contacts in the publishing industry, and an ability to juggle many tasks at one time. She began acquiring those skills during summers as a high school student working for her father’s business. “Publishing was always the subject of conversation at the dinner table,” she recalls. “‘Should we reprint this?’ ‘What about this scenario?’ We were always strategizing. It was in my blood from early on.”

With the stakes high in the publishing industry after a good first book, the critical next step for a new author is the second book. Says Lyons: “If that second one comes across my desk and I don’t think it’s as good as the first or a worthy follow-up, then I often have the difficult and unpopular task of telling them so. But it’s in their best interest.”

“Agents have a pretty critical role,” she continues, noting that she typically receives 150 to 200 submissions a week. “We’re an author’s first eyes. Our judgment is very important.”

So how does the shepherd use that judgment in deciding which queries to respond to— and which to let go? That depends, she says, on the quality of writing and the timeliness of an idea; in other words, on whether the market will be receptive to it. And on her own biological reaction.

“The very first thing, though, is whether I’m jumping out of my skin about this work,” says Lyons. “And if I pass on it, will I be able to sleep?”

The Editor

When Sharyn November ’82 first saw a classified ad in The New York Times for an editorial assistant position at a children’s book publisher, she thought, “You can do that for money?”

The answer, she discovered, was, “yes, although not for very much.” But that was 17 years ago, when taking a salary cut and living on 3/$1.00 ramen noodles seemed like a small price to pay. It turned out to be serendipity for November, who had chosen Sarah Lawrence specifically to concentrate on poetry. By the time she was 21, she had been published in Poetry Magazine and attended Bread Loaf on a working scholarship. But as an editor, she says, she is far more fulfilled, and reaches many more readers than she would have with her original career choice.

“I love my work! I see myself as a co-conspirator in the creative process,” says November. “Like a theater tech, I operate behind the scenes.”

At Penguin Group (USA) Inc. in New York City, November is the editorial director of Firebird, an imprint launched in January 2002 to publish paperback reprints of fantasy and science fiction for teenage and adult readers. She is also senior editor for Viking Children’s Books, where she edits hardcover fiction and nonfiction, mostly for teenagers, and a senior editor for Puffin Books, where she acquires paperback reprint rights. Her authors include four Newbery Honor Book Award winners, eight National Book Award finalists, one National Book Award winner, two World Fantasy Award finalists, and more. Altogether, she oversees the publication of about 40 books a year.

Firebird was born out of November’s experience with the teen readers she had been working with online, in schools and in public libraries since 1996. She quickly discovered that some of her most avid readers loved genre fiction and were going into the adult section. “And when I realized that,” says November, “it became the seed for Firebird.”

As an editor, November is the author’s main contact with a publishing house. She decides whether to buy a manuscript, then edits it: “I’m an old-fashioned line editor,” she says. An editor takes care of all the details, helps to arrange the cover art, and is what November describes as “the advocate all the way down the line” for both author and book.

“It’s like facilitating any piece of art—you want to assist the author, to get it as perfect as it can be. The editor simply provides another eye.”

“Editors strive to ensure that the books are as good as they can be,” she explains. “Maybe the story isn’t quite there yet, maybe the voice isn’t convincing, maybe the end doesn’t work. It’s like facilitating any piece of art—you want to assist the author, to get it as perfect as it can be. The editor simply provides another eye.”

What makes a good book? Characters who really live on the page, whose voices are authentic. “When we read, we want a good story, one that will draw us in, captivate us and take us out of our lives,” she says. November considers children and teenagers to be the most discern- ing of audiences. “They’re not reading something so they can sound intelligent at a cocktail party,” says November. “They can see through artifice and condescension a mile away.”

And to those who ask November when she will be moving up to “real books,” she rolls her eyes and responds: “I tell them that’s like asking a pediatrician when she’s going to start treating real patients.”

Editor’s Note: Sharyn November is not currently accepting new manuscripts, book ideas or teen readers.

The Publisher

An independent press? “Sounds like a terribly noble and doomed thing to try,” thought Bradley Armstrong ’96. Smitten with the idea despite his concerns, Armstrong recently joined forces with two other Sarah Lawrence graduates—Andrew Vernon ’95 and Tobin O’Donnell ’95. The result was Low Fidelity Press, an independent publishing house based in Brooklyn and Birmingham that issued its first book late last year. The initial impetus was to publish the kinds of books the three Sarah Lawrence grads were looking for but couldn’t find at their local bookstores.

Or as Armstrong explains it, “We wanted to create an outlet for worthy authors who might not be listened to elsewhere, especially with the consolidation of the major publishing houses and the general corporate mentality that has come to dominate the book business.”

Low Fidelity he says, runs under the principle that an independent press has the responsibility of “being the vocal chords for the voice that the corporate majority refuses to acknowledge.” Hence the name, which comes from the aesthetic that guides them— accomplishing for the publishing world what garage bands like the Melvins and Dead Kennedys did for music.

Another reason for the new publishing company: An acquaintance of theirs had started a press, and Armstrong, Vernon, O’Donnell and a fourth partner, Jeff Parker, strategized that if the friend could do it, then it couldn’t be all that difficult. (P.S. The friend’s press has since folded, and running theirs has been anything but easy, they say.)

B, a novel, by the Brooklyn-based author Jonathan Baumbach, was Low Fidelity’s first book. The story of an intellectual who struggles to write his personal history, B, a novel was released in a paperback edition in December. Trouble With The Machine, a paperback edition of poems by Christopher Kennedy, is due out later this year. Low Fidelity is also sponsoring a novella contest judged by author Robert Olmstead. It plans to publish the winning entry as a standalone book.

Using email, the partners run the business from their various locations. Vernon, who lives in Birmingham, is designing the cover for Trouble With The Machine on a home computer; he also operates the press’ warehouse from his basement. Parker lives in Columbus, Ohio, where he formats the books on a personal computer. Armstrong, the Brooklyn arm of the business, edits and oversees the public relations. And O’Donnell edits from San Francisco, where he lives.

“It’s a huge responsibility, which is why small presses fold so frequently,” says Armstrong. “You cannot think about money on any level when you’re running this kind of thing, or you’ll quit. At the same time, you have to constantly think about money, or you’ll be forced to quit.”

“But never,” he adds, “can you compromise what you’re doing because of a money-related problem, or there’s no point in doing any of it at all.”

All hold down other jobs. Armstrong runs a family-owned restaurant with his wife. O’Donnell is a freelance editor, writer and book reviewer. Vernon owns a multi-media production company. And Parker teaches writing at a college.

As for which books they choose to publish and why, the criteria is still in the An independent press? “Sounds like a terribly noble and doomed thing to try,” thought Bradley Armstrong ’96. Smitten with the idea despite his concerns, Armstrong recently joined forces with two other Sarah Lawrence graduates—Andrew Vernon ’95 and Tobin O’Donnell ’95. The result was Low Fidelity Press, an independent publishing house based in Brooklyn and Birmingham that issued its first book late last year. The initial impetus was to publish the kinds of books the three Sarah Lawrence grads were looking for but couldn’t find at their local bookstores.

“But never,” he adds, “can you compromise what you’re doing because of a money-related problem, or there’s no point in doing any of it at all.”

As for which books they choose to publish and why, the criteria is still in the process of being developed. “B sort of fell into our laps,” Armstrong says. “We started the press, and were looking for something to publish, and our friend’s press went under, which left him in contractual trouble. So, we bailed him out and got our ball rolling at the same time.”

So far, it appears to have been a good choice. “It’s doing a lot better than we hoped, although we’re still tallying the results,” reports O’Donnell. B can be found on the shelves of both independent and chain bookstores.

The Bookseller

It’s a rare find, truly the best of both worlds under a single bookstore’s roof: independence and variety. Charline Spektor ’74 is a bookstore owner with a mind of her own, and the breadth of product on her shelves offers a reader hours of pleasurable picking and choosing. The goal of Spektor’s Bookhampton— a group of three bookstores on Long Island—is to offer more than just a couple of choices. And it’s her very independence that has allowed her to loosen the chokehold on readers that chain bookstores can impose.

Most chains are locked into promoting certain kinds of inventory, even as they may offer space for browsing. But it’s the independent booksellers who are often willing to take a risk and acquaint the public with lesser-known authors—“like Dave Eggers, who came out of left field,” Spektor says, referring to the author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.

“Bookhampton is small enough to make an independent assessment of what’s good in the current book market and what readers in our community want, but we’re also big enough so we don’t have to just cherry-pick among the selections.”

Spektor, who purchased Bookhampton several years ago with her husband, Jeremy Nussbaum, points out that many of the smaller bookstores, while paying attention to the independent publishing houses and university presses, have limited budgets—and similarly limited shelf space in which to display their choices, she explains.

“By contrast,” she says, “the chains are filled to the gills with books that come mostly from the big five publishers.”

All booksellers, according to Spektor, whether large or small, fill a critical role along the route traveled by the written word from the pen of its creator to the eyes of the reader. As the editor helps shape the words and the publisher chooses which books to print, the bookseller decides which among the offerings to purchase for buyers, and which to display in the store’s window and on its tables.

“In other words,” says Spektor, “the bookseller decides which books to promote to the public.” While some specialize in what is known in publishing as “the backlist”—the classics found along the literature wall in the larger bookstores, everything from Austen to Zola—others feature mainly bestsellers.

Spektor also notes that bookstores of all sizes, including the larger ones in city shopping malls and the smaller ones in towns and villages, have increasingly become community centers, drawing people with a shared passion for the written word together. At her East Hampton store, for example, there are readings every Friday and Saturday, featuring authors like R.L. Stine and Candace Bushnell.

The role of the independent mind is not lost on Spektor. She and her husband purchased Bookhampton’s two existing stores in East Hampton and Southampton several years ago, opening the third in Sag Harbor earlier this year. Her mother, Mira J. Spektor ’51, is a part-owner of the East Hampton store. Charline also produces books on audio- tape, an eclectic mix issued under the banner of Airplay, Inc. Airplay, which sells to Books-on-Tape, produced E. L. Doctorow’s recording of Ragtime, as well as a recording of the complete Shakespeare sonnets read by Kathleen Turner, Al Pacino and Ossie Davis, among others.

“Audio is an extremely popular medium these days for getting the written word to an audience, especially for people whose time for sitting and reading is limited,” she explains. “For that reason, tapes are popular with commuters in their cars and with people working out in gyms, for example.”

But surprisingly, the books on audio have also appealed to “people sitting at home and listening, for the same reasons and in the same way that radio did,” she says, “because your imagination can take off in an altogether different direction.” Just like running a bookstore, perhaps.

The Librarian

You may obtain the next book you read from the bookshop around the corner—or from a library. How does the librarian create a library?

If it’s the Esther Raushenbush Library, observes librarian Sha Fagan, it can be a delicate, deliberate process. While public libraries and those in large universities house comprehensive collections, the acquisitions librarians at Sarah Lawrence must choose carefully, responding to specific curricular needs of faculty and students. The quarter-million volumes in the library’s collection are a reflection of the curriculum, showing the same kind of shifts and changes over time that you’d find in a set of the College’s 75 years of course catalogues.

“In a small college library, shelf space is often like real estate,” says Fagan, director of the Esther Raushenbush Library and Academic Computing. “Unused books take up valuable space. ‘Orphaned’ collections— resulting from faculty retirements and curriculum changes—are particularly challenging.”

Fagan, who can be spotted occasionally running her fingers over the tops of some of the library’s 2,000 volumes, says she sometimes relies on the “dust test” to determine which books are circulating.

“The readers are the people whom all of us along the written-word route are really serving. The reader is the ultimate destination.”

“In a college like this, there’s not a lot of popular fiction on the shelves. We purchase most of our new books in line with what the faculty request,” says Fagan, pointing also to the bulletin board near the library’s entrance, where book jackets of new acquisitions are displayed. On a late summer afternoon, there was Maxime Schwartz’s How the Cows Turned Mad, a history of the prion diseases, or subacute spongiform encephalopathies.

There was another from Adam Nicolson’s God’s Secretaries : The Making of the King James Bible, a look at the diverse personalities involved in the creation of that landmark version during the early 1600s. Along with the other new acquisitions this year, these two books will be used for course work. On the same afternoon, Charles Zerner, who holds the Barbara B. and Bertram J. Cohn Professorship in Environmental Studies, stops by, checking in with Fagan on whether the volumes he ordered for the fall semester have arrived.

As the school year moves along, a display of books by poets will take its place on the bulletin board, in anticipation of one of the featured events at the College’s 75th anniversary. Later, a display of book jackets will herald the Friends of the Library literary event in April, “An Evening with Ann Patchett,” with a representation of the novelist’s published works.

Like all library directors, Fagan must see to it that, above all, her resources meet the needs of one diverse and unpredictable market: the reader. “The readers are the people whom all of us along the written- word route are really serving,” says Fagan. “The reader is the ultimate destination.”

The Critic

Fifty years ago, novelist Dawn Powell said that most negative reviews added up to this: “If I had your car, I would have driven it someplace else.”

Unfortunately, not much has changed, says novelist Brian Morton ’78, a member of the Sarah Lawrence College faculty since 1998 and a book critic for such publications as The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Nation and New York Newsday.

Rejecting the “thumbs up/thumbs down” method, Morton takes a different approach. “When I review fiction, a large part of what I’m trying to do is to help each book find its readers,” Morton says. “For example, when I reviewed the new [Anita] Brookner novel in February [for The New York Times], the main thing I had in mind was writing something that might give readers who might be nourished by her work, but weren’t familiar with it as yet—readers who respond to ‘quiet’ and thoughtful and somewhat old-fashioned novels—a feeling for what it was about.”

Similarly, a few years ago, when Morton reviewed a comic noir novel about a woman who becomes involved with gangsters, kidnappers and dognappers, he told readers that he thought it was enjoyable—but then suggested that readers who enjoy the work of Jane Austen and were in search of a modern equivalent should look elsewhere.

“Sometimes one wants to drink wine, and sometimes one wants to drink grape soda,” he says. “It would be pointless, when writing about one thing, to complain that it isn't the other. Of course, there are examples of writers who are producing the literary equivalent of grape soda who try to pass themselves off as producers of fine literary wine, and in that case the duty of the reviewer is to make it clear what the writer is actually purveying.”

“Sometimes one wants to drink wine, and sometimes one wants to drink grape soda. It would be pointless, when writing about one thing, to complain that it isn’t the other."

Morton has written three novels of his own: The Dylanist, Starting Out in the Evening and A Window Across the River (just published by Harcourt). From 1988 until 1999, Morton was co-editor of the book review section of Dissent, a quarterly journal of politics and culture. In addition to the Brookner review (of Making Things Better), his most recent reviews included another, for The Nation in June, of James Wood’s The Book Against God: A Novel.

Does Morton—who is acutely aware of the impact a reviewer can have on a book’s future—write his own books with the critic in mind?

“I’d like to say that I don't, but the fact is that the thought of them creeps into my mind sometimes,” he concedes. “But it’s mostly profitless to think about them, because I don’t think you can ever really anticipate what the reviewers will say. If you set all the action of your novel in one place, the reviewers might praise you for your sense of place—or they might say the book seemed claustrophobic. If you write a globe-trotting novel, the reviewers might praise your range—or might say the book seemed scattered and diffuse. Since these things are out of one’s control, the best thing to do is just immerse yourself in your work as deeply as you can without worrying about what reviewers will say.

“It’s only when you’re writing for yourself that you write anything decent, anyway.”