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Maybe I’m naive, but I was surprised that T C Boyle’s story in this week’s Harper’s was boring.

I’ve heard good things about T C Boyle, and about Harper’s. Combine that with a story titled ‘What Separates Us From The Animals’ and I thought I was in for a sure thing. The reason I treat myself to a foreign magazine when I travel any serious distance is that I hope it will broaden my literary … ah, horizons. I guess it still did that this time, just … backward, to the horizon behind me.

I guess I pick up a magazine like Harper’s with the awareness that inside I will encounter a sample of the descendents of tradition, for whom I do have a healthy sense of respect, but so often this tradition strikes a chord so far from my intellectual and emotional interest that I wonder if I’ve stepped into a parallel universe where people find this quaint sort of bullshit actually interesting.

I could tolerate it if the insights into the human condition were powerful and formative, forcing me to reconsider my values or those of others I have encountered. Maybe the insights in this story did that for some readers. I know! Maybe a young, suburban Australian male with progressive, innovative pretensions is not among Harper’s ideal demographic!

But this reminds me of a debate my girlfriend and I have been having about the importance of opera companies and orchestras performing new work. She mentions often that opera companies and orchestras don’t perform a lot of contemporary work because the aged audience simply won’t stand for it – neither literally nor figuratively. The classics need to be represented in each year’s program to garauntee attendance – slipping the ocassional experimental contemporary piece in there is a considerable financial risk for the company.

She’s probably right, and maybe Harper’s is like that: keeping the interest of the older, more conservative demographic who can still justify the expense of a magazine, and might do so long enough to finance the emergence of the new writers.

But a magazine like Harper’s is not going to attract an audience appreciative of these new writers by continuing to publish stories like Boyle’s, about a middle-aged housewife who can’t tolerate the substandard personal hygiene of the doctor her town committee imported from the mainland. (If it weren’t for the reference to the internet in Boyle’s story, I could have assumed it was both written and set in the early twentieth century.) If younger audiences go and read elsewhere, Harper’s won’t have an appreciative audience for any new writing they publish.

If audiences stick with Harper’s, the new writers will descend so directly from the forefathers of tradition that literary progress will be significantly hampered.  Then, what if Harper’s audience dies before it begins publishing the sort of progressive stories a younger demographic might enjoy? Stories that are a bit more fucked up, a bit more contemporary, a bit less quaint and safe.

But, as Lara likes to remind me, if everyone thought like me the world would be in turmoil, so maybe the literary tradition represented by Harper’s constitutes a necessary status quo, an anchor for readers of the conservative left, around which they might hover safely, keeping their head above the water as they brush past more innovative, dangerous creatures under the surface with their legs.

Or maybe it’s me, and one day, when I grow up, I’ll develop an appreciation for Harper’s stories the same way I developed an appreciation for olives, avocado, tomatoes, mushrooms (all of which I hated as a child): by force-feeding them to myself and trying to think about what tasted good about them.

This article on Dave Eggers’ optimism about youth literacy and print books (via @Mean_land) made me think of the title of his unfinished Salon.com serial, The Unforbidden is Compulsory, or, Optimism: for Eggers, it would seem, optimism about print books is compulsory, and should not be forbidden.

Elsewhere (almost everywhere else), it seems the trend is in the chatter: it’s trendy to be pessimistic about print books, regardless of whether there is actually a declining trend in print-book readership, because worrying about the decline of print books seems to illustrate your affinity with digitial technology and the democritising power of the internet.

But I think it’s true that the concern is misguided:

Adults might be projecting from their own behavior when they worry that kids will forsake reading in favor of Twitter, Eggers said, as some adults in the audience nodded in apparent self-recognition. “We’re blaming the kids, but we’re the ones who can’t stop checking our e-mail and adding the latest Google apps.”

So stop worrying about it, stop reading this blog, and go sit in the park with a book, it’s spring time!

For ages I had this article open in my browser at work because I am loosely interested in keeping in touch with developments in experimental fiction: some days I just want to read a good book, of the ‘lyrical realist’ variety mentioned in the article – the kind of novel we inherited from the nineteenth century; other days I feel bored and want to read something I have to work hard to understand.

I tend to leave these sorts of articles open until I’m feeling relaxed enough to read them over lunch or something, because I know if there’s any sort of revelatory information in there I’m going to need to feel receptive to doing anything with that information, such as, in this case, ordering a book by a writer I’ve never heard of, from a publisher I’ve never heard of in a city I’ve heard a lot about, but never visited.

The book – a novel called Fences, written by eighteen-year-old British schoolboy, Ben Brooks – is published by Fugue State Press in New York, and is not to be confused with the 1990 Garth Brookes album, No Fences.

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According to FSP’s minimalist website, their novels

tend to be unusual – singular, eccentric, impractical, emotional, visionary. They are also ‘experimental’ in the sense that any good art is experimental. It comes down to one person looking for truth.

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This is the sort of grandiosty that makes me shell out coin at a dubious online checkout and then forget about my purchase until it arrives in the mail, at which point I will fall into one of my new armchairs to douse myself in a … ahem … fugue of literary inspiration. Or frustration, depending on how the book weighs on the ol’ effectiveness scale.

Right now I’m just hoping the difference in time it takes to receive the package from the US varies from now only as fractionally as the difference in the strengths of our dollars, for this US$15 novel cost me a whopping AU$15.15 including postage.

Obviously I’ll review it here sometime after it arrives.
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Yesterday afternoon, waiting for an author who was waiting on the other side of the cafe, I had a chance to read ‘Clinching’, a story by Emmett Stinson in the first issue of Kill Your Darlings.¹

Emmett, at 30-odd, is on the cusp of SIB’s definition of ‘young writer’, but I’ve been encountering his work since Wakefield published a University of Adelaide anthology he was involved with back in 2005 or thereabouts, when he must have been around 25: his Age Short Story Competition winning story, ‘All Fathers The Father’, reminded be of The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith², back when I was still enamoured of Peter Carey. So he’s more of our demographic than, say Peter Carey’s.

Now Emmett has a book of his own out: Known Unknowns, one of the collections released as part of Affirm Press’s Long Story Shorts competition.

‘Clinching’ opens with Anna punching Steve in her sleep, and closes with him feeling sorry about it, because in between are all the reasons they know he probably deserved it.

In particular, something went wonky in their relationship when he got so arse-numbingly drunk he pissed in her sock drawer during the night.

Now, I actually did this once. I include no qualifier because the exact thing happened: I got so arse-numbingly drunk I pissed in my then-girlfriend’s sock drawer during the night.

These are unusually synchronistic circumstances, but this is exactly what I come to literature for: to read about the similar experiences of others, so that I might get a handle on my feelings about my own experiences. That someone might have even conceived the fictional idea of pissing in their girlfriend’s sock drawer is enough to make me feel fractionally less like a fuckwad: this might not have happened to Emmett, but some similar almost certainly did, and that’s why he’s writing about it. Or it happened to someone he knows.

Either way, the function of literature connecting others in isolation is what draws me to it. That’s right, I said ‘function’.

And I’m going to say this: the opening is the punchiest opening I’ve read in ages. It dragged me in, and the story held me captive until the … actually, until I realised the end would be too neat, which it was, and in the affected way that suggests it shouldn’t feel neat – like the story’s own background characters’ hair, described, as in myriad other urban stories, as ‘consciously unwashed for several days so it would droop in a manner that seemed fashionably messy and unaffected’.

Otherwise the writing is mostly absorbing, funny and a pleasure to imbibe: really, it slides into your mind like a first Friday beer. The observations about interpersonal dynamics are insightful and interesting. And the characters are plausibly flawed and flailing. This is my kind of story.

It’s a worthy story, but it’s unexceptional due to the fact it’s a little too expository for my tastes: the themes are revealed with eloquence, but the characters are kind of generic, due to there not being a lot in the way of description, action³, and setting. This could be a good thing: you might like this.

Other stories I’ve read by Emmett were exceptional, and some of them are probably in his debut collection, which you can buy from Affirm Press’s website. I would, if I were you.

If, understandably, you don’t want to take my word for it based on my reading of a few stories, here are some actual reviews of the actual collection: With Extra Pulp’s and Overland’s.

Onwards! Keep out of sock drawers!

1. I take my time: KYD are up to issue three now, and they’re a quarterly.
2. which is actually quite good – it carries remnants of Carey’s penchant for magic realism, before he got got corrupted by the Australian realist novel machine
3. read: movement, not gunfights

Stone Soup

There’s a magazine that publishes writers even younger than Voiceworks: Stone Soup, published out of Santa Cruz and described by someone as ‘The New Yorker of the 8 to 13 set’.

In the interests of SIB’s subtitle, I wonder if they have an adult readership. They reckon their circulation is at 20 000, with library subscriptions taking their estimated readership to near 80 000. Epic!

Tom Cho launched Voiceworks in Melbourne last night, and apparently he said ‘Whitney Houston once sang: “I believe the children are our future. Teach them well and let them lead the way.”’ It gives me hope to know that Voiceworks is facilitating the expression of the sort of people who understand and value this. Tom Cho’s doing pretty alright for himself as a novelist, another Australian author whose first publications were in Voiceworks.

Voiceworks is a place where young writers and artists educate themselves. You don’t need to poke around Virgule, the magazine’s blog, for long to glimpse the bounty they’re sharing.

The issue they launched is ‘Birthmarks’, number 81. I recommend you buy it here. If you’re not sure why you should, check out these reviews. It only costs eight bucks, but if you read it four times, that’s like two bucks a read.

It looks like this:

Over at Virugle there is a mostly-one-way discussion being had about how terrible Australian Book Review is for deciding not to award the inaugural Young Calibre Non-fiction Prize – an essay prize that matches their esteemed Calibre Prize, but for writers under 21. Unfortunately, apart from a questionable call for transparency, I don’t get a clear sense, from the comments on the Virgule post, exactly what the problem is.

I’ll get to why the call for transparency is questionable at the end, but first I’ll try to understand what some of the fuss is about, with qualifications that are worth considering before we go mouthing off about ABR’s commitment to youth literature.

One, it’s disappointing because it’s one less young writer published in an established journal. But this happens all the time and we don’t blog angrily about it. Perhaps that’s because, two, this collective rejection casts a shadow over the whole community of young writers. But the implication that zero out of 100 young writers are not good enough to be published in ABR is not so hard to swallow – that’s not a big slush pile, and I know a bunch of young writers, outside of that slush pile, who have written for ABR, myself included.

So, I dunno, it just seems like a lot of anti-ageism noise. Worse, ill-thought-out allegations that this decision means ABR don’t really support youth literature only shitcans their attempt to do so. Worst: Ben’s claims that ABR refused to award the prize because ‘its reputation or the respect of its readers might be damaged by the publication of a young person’s ideas’.

Phooey! Such a blatantly antagonistic, deliberate misinterpretation of their decision is simply uncool, and posting this as a comment on Virgule seems determined to pit the gilted applicants against ABR. Yep, that’s anti-ageist noise alright, especially when you consider the form letter doesn’t say this at all. It says:

In [discharging our right not to award a prize] we are mindful of our responsibilities to readers, to the magazine’s reputation for excellence, to our sponsor and – most importantly – to the entrants themselves.

Who’s to say the ABR editors aren’t on the phone/keyboard right now to the shortlist, commending them for their work and commissioning an In Brief, to get the shortlistees working on something more manageable than a full-length essay? So far we’ve only had a snapshot – from people who are upset they didn’t win, as much as they’re upset that no one won.

Even if the editors aren’t on the phone, it just doesn’t seem like something worth making a big deal about. Rejection slips are nothing new. Applicants are free to send their essays elsewhere. They’re running the prize again (another commendable initiative forgotten by most of the commenters), by which time the dedicated among the applicants might have developed enough to enter a winner.

Meanwhile, pulling the prize this year might actually be considered commendable: they are presumably (and understandably) worried about publishing poorly expressed ideas, which, let’s face it, are going to be among the majority in a slush pile of 100 from young writers – even at Voiceworks, where we would receive between 200 and 300 submissions per quarter, we were often scraping the barrel, because it’s true: young writers are usually not as accomplished as older, established writers – the ‘established’ is important: it’s not age that qualifies you as a good writer, but the amount of time, energy and dedication you’ve poured into developing your work, plus the extent of your natural affinity for ideas, and the ability to express them.

During Voiceworks Editorial Committee meetings we would often debate the merits of publishing a lesser-quality piece by a younger writer. There were usually two fronts: doing so might encourage the writer to continue developing their work – to keep writing at all, even – and we might get to publish their higher-quality work later; doing so might undermine the magazine’s reputation for exceptional quality, meaning that readers might not hang around until the time the younger writer had grown up.

Deciding to pull the prize this year does not, necessarily, undermine ABR’s commitment to youth literature. In fact, two alternatives to pulling the plug on the prize could be worse.

One, run something mediocre, which ABR’s older readership might read with disdain, which they then carry over to the broader community of young writers. And every applicant other than the winner remains equally gilted, as they read the winner that’s not as good as they think their essay is.

Two (as suggested in the comments), edit the fuck out of the piece, which undermines the integrity of an award anyway – it’s not an award for an essay-with-great-potential – and establishes a misrepresentation among older readers, as well as a sense of false hope among the winner – few other outlets (Voiceworks aside, of course) will give the author the same extent of editorial attention in the future, when they start shooting equally mediocre essays from the hip at every major paper that still runs them.

In anticipation of the retort that who are Peter Rose and Mark Gomes to determine the nature of mediocrity, I come back to the questionable call for transparency.

Reading the article that Sam Cooney linked to from the comments at Virgule, I was reminded prizes are not much more than simple publishing decisions with a fancy label.

The decision might look different – it is preceded by a public call for submissions, presided over by a public (albeit usually secretive) panel of judges, and succeeded by publication with a gold sticker.

Compare this to other publishing decisions, which are preceded by a private solicitation of submissions, presided over by a private (albeit disparate, but no less inaccessible) panel of arbiters – agents, editors and (if you play with the big kids) marketing departments – and succeeded by publication without a gold sticker.

The only real difference is the sticker, which might momentarily and marginally influence sales, but does little to influence the aesthetic judgement of readers, which is what really drives sales, and therefore the extent of an author’s readership.

The decision to award a prize to a piece of literature is no less subjective than to publish one in the general sense, so ABR deciding not to award a prize merely means that nothing they received was worthy of a prize. It takes balls to do that – especially with so many egotistical writers (read: writers) running around – and at this stage I remain convinced that they not only have a right to do this, but a duty, to prevent mediocre literature being published as award-winning literature, an idea that is inherently contradictory.

ABR is a journal of particularly high … uh, calibre, so the upset over its rejection of these young writers’ advances is understandable, on a superficial level. But the panel was just a couple of editors looking for outstanding submissions from young writers. Attacking an establishment outlet for failing to award a youth-literature prize doesn’t help the very cause this outlet is trying to promote.

This is an important new prize run by an important journal with a long-running history of publishing high-quality ideas about literature. If we shitcan this prize it in its inaugural year, I bet the loud mouths won’t blame themselves for it folding – it’ll be the fault of yet another esteemed, establishment journal looking down on youth literature.

It’s not cool of the youth literati to go shooting their mouths off like this, so if you have a legitimate and informed criticism of the decision, I would love to hear it, and will happily respond in comments below, while eating the form letter. That means I will try to eat my twenty-inch iMac, so I’m pretty serious about this – please comment: tear me to shreds!

In my last post about Nic Low’s manuscript I described ‘Tailings’ as ‘a beautiful duck, wearing a tiara … bobbing up and down on [the sea of mediocrity] … that results from the seemingly indiscriminate publication of some 12 000+ books per year in Australia’.

I now realise that’s a bit harsh: Australia has a proud history of publishing amazing literature, and my comment was, perhaps, inadvertently disparaging of Australia’s avid-reader population. It was a holier-than-thou thing to say, the implication being that general readers are less discerning than me, which may or may not be true, but a book editor crapping on about his discerning palate is kind of like a mechanic being righteous about the fact he knows how to tune a car better than his customers – this fact is self-evident, otherwise people would tune their own damn cars.

Anyway.

All I was trying to say is that I am excited about having the ability to get amazing manuscripts to publishers on behalf of authors. This is what I want to be doing for my day job. To prolapse the metaphor further: I want to paddle around in a leaky boat, scooping up princess ducks and bringing them to shore, handing them over to publishers and saying, ‘Feed them well, they will nourish many.’

This felt like a pipe dream until I read Nic’s manuscript. It felt like a pipe dream because I knew that I was missing an important element of the equation that equals successful agenting: quality manuscripts.

Quality manuscripts + diligent, active authors + publishing contacts + editorial savvy + youthful naivety + insanity + the empirically unfounded conviction that communication through literature will make the world a better place = Paine Management, my latent literary agency.

I have all of these now, so it’s only a matter of time, patience and dedication – the three core things that got me as far as working as a book editor by 22, something that I had never imagined possible when I was smoking bongs in the back shed and dropping out of uni and scribbling all over those beautiful Peter Carey paperback reprints that UQP released.

So, yeah, the name of my imaginary literary agency is Paine Management. Get it? I will take the pain out of getting your manuscript published, and the pain out of finding a manuscript to publish. I’m allowed to make bad jokes about my name. You are too. (In fact, Sam Twyford-Moore already did it, in a letter to Voiceworks while I was there.)

I want to bundle together a portfolio of the best unpublished manuscripts of young, emerging Australian writers, fold it under my arm and take it, in my leaky boat, to New York City.

I’m thinking of further honing the subject and theme of this blog to cover this journey as an emerging agent – to cover things like trying to develop an author-agent contract when I know almost nothing about contracts. (I’ve taken on contracts administration at work, but I still feel as though I’m learning a second language.)

So if you’re into that sort of thing, come along. Meanwhile, I have a question for you. It’s pretty broad, but here goes: what are your experiences of trying to find a literary agent in Australia?

If you don’t have any experience with this, but know someone who does, please forward a link to this post. I’d like to start a dialogue about it, so I can start thinking about how to achieve this ridiculously ambitious dream of facilitating the best emerging Australian writing onto the world stage.

Something else I’ve been doing lately, while not being a high-flying literary judge, is reading Nic Low’s novel manuscript, ‘Tailings’. Because I’m a youth-literature crusader and everything. Nic is not exactly ‘a youth’, but whatever.

I’m familiar with some of Nic’s other arts work, so I was delighted when he asked me to read and edit his manuscript. I’ve been helping him to prepare it for submission to the Vogel, despite my reservations about awards, which I mentioned, and which I discussed here. It’s a deadline, at least – one that’s been extended!

The Manuscript

Nic’s manuscript is one of the most accomplished, challenging and thought-provoking manuscripts I have read in a very long time. It’s about: Tailings, a half-caste Chinese girl in colonial Victoria during the Gold Rush, who is looking for her mother’s bones while her Irish father digs and drinks himself into suppressing the loss of his wife; and Volker, a 1930s anatomist and eugenicist enamoured of The Third Reich’s racial purity program, who is implicated in the surgically executed live dissection of a young Chinese man. (There is lots of death in this manuscript – I would go as far as to call it a ‘literary thriller’.)

Chinese, colonial and German themes all wrap around each other in the most intricate way, entwined with a minimalism so accomplished that I remain gobsmacked that it is the first novel manuscript of a 30-year-old writer.

Books it reminds me of: Illywhacker and True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey, Original Face by Nicholas Jose and Many Years a Thief by David Hutchison.

NB: Nic Low is neither Peter Carey nor Nicholas Jose, nor David Hutchison; Nic Low is Nic Low, a 30-year-old writer / festival director / public installation artist. (He is also a self-taught web designer and developer – in fact, in exchange for my work on his manuscript, he’s gonna trick this blog out with bouncing hydraulic shockers.)

He’s at the beginning of his career as a novelist and he has produced a first manuscript that punches in the same division as those novels above.

I’m not bullshitting.

No Bullshit

If you are familiar with any of my published criticism, or have talked with me for longer than two minutes about books, you will understand that this sort of praise does not come easy to me. Working as a book editor and critic has rendered me more discerning than I would care to be: I don’t enjoy books as much as I used to, because most of the books I read could have been better than they are.

This could be considered a bad thing: you could wax lyrical about how the dissection and criticism of literature renders it lifeless and uninspiring.

Or it could be considered a good thing: instead of meandering through the sea of mediocrity that results from the seemingly indiscriminate publication of some 12 000+ books per year in Australia (vaguely enjoying most things but never really being inspired to write, think, learn, explore), every now and then I stumble across a manuscript like this that blows my fucking brain, bobbing up and down on that sea like a diamond wearing a life vest … or something less garish. A beautiful duck, wearing a tiara … perhaps.

‘Tailings’ is one to look out for, I reckon.

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been co-judging, along with Stefan Laszczuk, a short-story prize run by the editors of Adelaide University’s student magazine, On Dit.

Of course I put my hand up, because now I am a fusty old ex-Voiceworks editor, desperate to get my hands on the raw content of young, emerging Australian writers. Really, reading submissions – at Voiceworks and in the capacity of a judge – is like tapping into a rare natural resource: it makes me all dizzy wondering about the sort of books that will be published in the next 10 to 20 years.

Hearsay is going to be ‘a glossy and professionally printed literary annual featuring the best emerging Adelaide writers’ that will be ‘distributed around the Adelaide CBD in May’.

Here is the introduction I wrote for the collection:

Props to old people and everything, but so much literature produced by adults, for adults, is characterised by a weird sort of fogginess. I put this down to the fact they have to sound like they know what they’re talking about because … well, because adults are supposed to know what they’re talking about, and when they realise they don’t know what they’re talking about at all, the lesser adult authors deal with this by jacking up the profound-sounding words and the awkwardly constructed sentences.

They talk about the same old shit, in language that makes it seem like they’re talking about something new and incredibly meaningful. They beguile their adult readers into reciting passages aloud at their book clubs and saying, ‘Mmm, yes, I see …’

Old people have to maintain this pretension, lest young people run up to them, steal their crown, and wear it to the pub, getting it all scuffed and smudged with garlic sauce.

The best young writers, on the other hand, are confronting their ignorance through writing, so inevitably their stories are explorations of new ideas. Ignorance dissipates pretension, and what we are left with is a distillation of the pure, heartfelt, curious sense of adventure that is consistently absent from so much adult literature.

These young writers have not yet been hypnotised by an engorged need for creative rhetoric: they’re not trying to dupe you into feeling something about something you don’t understand. They tell it how it is. They write about love (awkward, unrequited, shared, illicit), dreams (made, lost, abandoned), obsession, hatred (even murder), ambition and torment. And they don’t fuck around.

Older writers are great – they’re who we learn from – but young writers are who we can draw inspiration from. They’re writing about the present, but they are the future – these stories are the buds of ideas that will blossom in time.

Stefan and I have chosen a ‘winning story’, and two ‘runners up’: ‘Mutual Friends’, then ‘The Four Seasons’ and ‘House Party’. There is no such thing as a ‘winning story’. These just happen to be the ones we most enjoyed. You will feel differently – such is the beauty of literature, and the diversity of this collection.