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Anthologists' Roundtable
Thomas Beller is a founder and editor of Open City Magazine and Books and mrbellersneighborhood.com. He is the author of a collection of stories, Seduction Theory, and a novel, The Sleep-over Artist. His most recent book is a collection of personal essays, How to Be a Man. He is also the editor of the anthology With Personals: Dreams and Nightmares from 20 Young Writers, and co-editor of With Love and Squalor: 14 Writers Respond to the Work of J.D. Salinger.
Jaime Clarke is a founder of Post Road Magazine. He is the author of the novel, We're So Famous, and the editor of the anthology Don't You Forget About Me: Comtemporary Writers on the Films of John Hughes. His website is: www.weresofamous.com.
T Cooper is the author of the novels Lipshitz Six, or Two Angry Blondes, and Some of the Parts. T is also co-editor of a collection of original stories entitled A Fictional History of the United States with Huge Chunks Missing. For more about T Cooper go to: www.t-cooper.com.
Emily Franklin is the author of two novels: The Girls' Almanac and Liner Notes, as well as a critically-acclaimed fiction series, The Principles of Love. She edited It's a Wonderful Lie: 26 Truths about Life in Yours Twenties and is co-editor of Before: Short Stories about Pregnancy from Our Top Writers and After: Short Stories about Parenting from our Top Writers. Another collection Eight Nights: Chanukah Essays is forthcoming in Fall 2007. For more about Emily Franklin go to: emilyfranklin.com
John McNally is the author of two novels, America's Report Card and The Book of Ralph, and one story collection, Troublemakers. He has edited five anthologies, ranging in subjects from adultery to baseball. His latest anthology, When I Was a Loser: True Stories of (Barely) Surviving High School, will be published in March. For more about John McNally go to: bookofralph.com
Elissa Schappell is the author of the novel Use Me, and co-editor with Jenny Offill of the anthologies The Friend Who Got Away and Money Changes Everything. She is a co-founder of Tin House and a contributing editor of Vanity Fair and formerly Senior Editor of The Paris Review.
How did you conceive the idea for your most recent anthology?
CLARKE: A long time ago, I worked in publishing and one day I got a mass email solicitation from an editor who’d just started at Simon Spotlight Entertainment and who was looking for manuscripts. I had no idea what kind of books Simon Spotlight Entertainment published, but after doing a little research, I realized SSE was the perfect home for a book about the films of John Hughes, films that I and my friends loved growing up. I pitched the idea of an oral history of the Hughes films to SSE and they loved it. I made wild promises about interviewing the principal actors from Pretty in Pink, Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Ferris, Some Kind of Wonderful, and Weird Science. Worse: I believed these promises and felt sure that I could assemble the oral history in no time flat. I sent out queries to the agents of the stars of the Hughes films and waited. And nothing happened. When SSE finally checked in, I confessed that no one wanted to participate. On the spot, I offered up an anthology of personal essays about the films of John Hughes, knowing how the films had affected so many of my writer friends. As I typed this new idea out, my enthusiasm for it grew and I realized that my casual suggestion was in fact the better idea: I yearned to know others’ experiences with the movies that had meant so much to me as a teenager. SSE loved this new idea as much as I did and I set about querying my favorite writers.
COOPER: My co-editor and I were basically sitting around talking a lot during the summer after the Iraq invasion, just the usual complaining about the current administration and how terrifying its obliteration of any notion of the "truth" was/is. We were just shooting the shit about history and how it gets written, all that--the usual Howard Zinn critique of history as being written by the winners, etc.. And we naturally moved on to fiction writers' roles in the creation and understanding of history--what we as fiction writers might be able to do to feel connected to this period in history, and so many others past.
So we came up with this idea of doing a sort of fictional version of Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States. We didn't want to end up with a collection full of overtly political short stories--we both felt like the minute you know an author's political leanings when you're reading a story or novel, it sort of falls apart immediately. But we wanted the politics to be by inference in a way--that is, as a collection the book was to make a comment on the way supposed "history" was being manufactured before our eyes these days. If we're not careful, the image of Bush in a Navy uniform and vest landing on an aircraft carrier, pumping his fist, and shouting "Job well done!" will be the "official" record of this war and will inevitably slip between the covers of our supposed "history" books.
FRANKLIN: It's a Wonderful Lie: 26 Truths about Life in Yours Twenties came about naturally via a conversation with an editor about how that decade is infamous for building expectations and then dashing them. I figured people would have a lot to say about the subject and that people who were in or out of their 20s would enjoy reading about the variety of experiences from then.
MCNALLY: I’ve written a lot of fiction about teens, so the subject of When I Was a Loser: True Stories of (Barely) Surviving High School was a natural for me. If I’m remembering this correctly, I was tinkering with writing an essay of my own that would fall under the “high school loser” rubric when I thought, hey, why not just do this as an anthology? The key is to find a good, marketable idea that hasn’t been done before. There are plenty of unmarketable ideas floating around out there, and there are plenty of marketable ones that have been done to death.
SCHAPPELL: When my co-editor Jenny Offill were touring for our first book The Friend Who Got Away we found that one of the essays, which was about a longtime friendship that broke up over money, kept coming up time and again as one people fascinated by.
How hard was it to find a publisher?
CLARKE: The cart came before the horse on this one, though generally I understand it’s much harder to sell an anthology to a publisher than a short story collection.
COOPER: This was the easiest part of the process because once we wrote up our pitch letter for the collection, we had just one place in mind: Akashic Books. My first novel was published by them in 2002, and Adam has had various essays and stories in other Akashic anthologies over the years, so we both knew immediately that because of its politics, Akashic was the perfect home for a book like this--and that they would do it right, in close collaboration with us. Johnny Temple, the Akashic publisher, agreed, and we set a pub date and got to work.
FRANKLIN: For this anthology, not hard at all. With others, I've had more trouble.
MCNALLY: Free Press, who’s publishing When I Was a Loser also published my last two books of fiction. I had a “first look” clause in my contract with them, so my agent and I showed it to them first. To be honest, I didn’t think they would want it, and I assumed we’d have to shop it around, but they went for it.
Out of eight proposals I’ve put together for anthology ideas, I’ve sold five. I don't think that’s too bad of a ratio. The book that was most difficult to place was The Student Body: Short Stories about College Students and Professors. Editors at New York houses were interested, but it always died when it reached the marketing department. I eventually placed it with a university press, which made the most sense.
SCHAPPELL: We published Money Changes Everything with the same editor who did The Friend Who Got Away so we didn’t shop it elsewhere. The first book was sold on what would become the introduction and our essays.
How hard was it to find contributors?
CLARKE: I was lucky in that I knew a lot of writers from my work on Post Road, a literary magazine I co-founded. Plus a lot of my friends are writers. And the Hughes films are so beloved that it was heartbreaking to actually have to limit the number of contributors.
COOPER: Once we crafted a call for submissions letter, it was quite easy to get contributors. (Composing that letter was actually the hardest part, getting it just right). It turned out that writers were eager to contribute to a book that had a clear mission, as opposed to say, just being a collection about things that happen at night, working in retail, etc. I'm not saying those aren't good binding themes for anthologies, I'm just saying that we found that writers were eager to set to work on a sort of "political" endeavor, to take moments in history and play with them and tease a little more out of them than what you'll find in the official history books. Or people seemed happy to tackle these moments and people in history that aren't typically truthfully dealt with, to bring light to subjects that seemed like they had to be made up, but actually happened. (Like Ota Benga the African pygmy who was exhibited with the monkeys at the Bronx Zoo.)
FRANKLIN: The balance is finding contributors that have something interesting to say while putting together a list that pleases the publisher. Many people were excited to contribute and others had either no time or couldn't commit. But I like the process of finding as a whole.
MCNALLY: For When I Was a Loser, it wasn’t hard at all. The writers I asked seemed to like the book’s premise, so it wasn’t a chore for them, I don’t think. A few writers agreed to write essays and then never came through, while other writers I really wanted in the book didn’t have time to write an original essay. But that’s not unusual. By and large, however, the writers I asked came through for me with great contributions.
SCHAPPELL: It’s ironic—when we approached writers about The Friend Who Got Away, almost to a person the response, “That’s a great idea I have a story...” and they’d proceed to confess their friend break-up story—when we approached people about Money Changes Everything they’d say, “That’s a great idea...” and pause, and there would be this long silence. When we’d ask, “Do you have a story? Would you write an essay for us?” They’d stammer and blush like they’d been busted for shoplifting—”No, no, not really.” Famously revealing writers flat out demurred saying, “I know I’ve written about alcoholism, my drug problem, how I hate my mother, but I cannot write about money.” Others, again writers who thought nothing of writing at length about their sexual proclivities, kept promising and promising to turn in their essays, but then ultimately could never get it up.
What was the most surprising aspect of editing an anthology?
CLARKE: The legal vetting, hands down. I knew, of course, that because the pieces were memoir, that there would be legal vetting, but I wasn’t prepared for how nervous publishers are these days about getting sued. The vetting took more than a month and I know several of the contributors were exasperated at having to change true details to fake ones just to prevent a lawsuit. It’s a slippery slope from there to something like the James Frey memoir, and as the editor, I felt stuck in the middle. I both wanted to please the publisher and protect the artistic integrity of the pieces. Hopefully both parties were satisfied.
COOPER: The volume of work, and people's seeming inability to tell the difference
between fiction and non-fiction. Which was kind of cool--and sort of the point of the whole book--if a little frustrating at times to explain constantly the difference between essays and fiction.
FRANKLIN: Enjoying the editing. I used a part of my brain usually reserved for my own work and found that the editing work satisfied me in a different way than writing.
MCNALLY: I’m always surprised by the friendships that evolve as a result of putting one of these things together. I’m about to co-edit a sixth anthology with an author I included in my fourth anthology. We’ve become good friends since I first found his work via the recommendation of a former student of mine. I’m often surprised, too, by the generosity of some of the “big name” writers, writers who don’t need to contribute to the book but who generously offer their work nonetheless.
SCHAPPELL: How some of these writers, encouraged to write about a subject they might never have attacked otherwise, wrote what I consider to be their best work to date.
It’s often said that anthologies aren’t worth the effort, both money-wise and time-wise. What would you say to that?
BELLER: It's true. They are not worth the effort in terms of money, and they take up a lot of time, though much more importantly they take up a lot of mental space. I put one of my pieces in both the anthologies I edited, so there is that, although it feels a bit uncouth--not wrong, just needy somehow, though hopefully the gesture is redeemed by the essay itself. With the Salinger anthology I was co-editor with Kip Kotzen, a very astute, sensitive reader who did more than half of the work and who was the driving force on that book, but with Personals it was just me and my editor at Houghton Mifflin, a very smart, anxious young editor named Wendy Holt. This book was not organized around a theme, such as your most memorable concert experience or only childhood - to name two anthologies to which I recently contributed essays. The only mandate was that the authors be under some nebulous mid-thirties age. The process of finding 20 authors, working out what they might write about, getting the pieces, and then working on each piece at length (though some needed more work than others) began to seem overwhelming. But a peculiar thing happened which was the process began to be maddening and difficult in a way reminiscent of family life, and the rewards have had similar overtones. Not that we get together for big reunions, which couldn't be further from the case. But I was the one pulling it all together, and now, about a decade later, the principal reward of the whole thing has been to feel that the anthology really did capture not just a group of voices, but a tenuous moment not only in the lives of the writers, but in their lives AS writers, as many of them are having very interesting careers. In some strange way it just gets more and more interesting to me as time goes by, and by extension more and more rewarding and worth having done. But then this just skirts the larger and more mysterious issue--into which is bound ideas of families, parties, curiosity, control--of what drives a person to the peculiar act of editing.
CLARKE: I guess I’d liken the effort to that of working on Post Road. Endeavors like literary magazines and anthologies certainly aren’t worth the effort if you’re only it for the money. For me, the sense of belonging to a literary community is the ultimate reward for projects like these. I enjoy the rapport anthologies and literary magazines build with other writers and I especially enjoy being a member of the community. So it’s worth it in that respect. I also had the pleasure of guest editing an issue of the Mississippi Review in the late 90s, which was my first go at something like this, and I can still remember the satisfaction of holding the finished copy in my hand; I felt the same sense of satisfaction when I saw the first finished copy of the Hughes anthology. While part of you is glad it’s done, part of you wonders how it got done. The rest of you is feeling something close to nostalgia.
COOPER: It's hard to comment on the money part because we didn't set out at any point to "make money" on this collection. I think that if we had published with a corporate press, money might've been more of an issue, but since Akashic's politics lines right up with both our personal politics and the politics behind the book, the money thing just didn't really enter into the equation. We wanted to make sure that contributors got paid roughly what they might from a corporate press (we managed this by not taking anything up front for ourselves), the illustrator and designer got paid, etc., but beyond that, I just didn't want Akashic to lose money on the venture. It's a little soon to tell, but I'm pretty sure we are well into the black with the book at this point.
As far as the effort goes, I'm not gonna lie and say it wasn't a pain in the ass at some points. I didn't realize the editing of the book was going to coincide with the sale of and editing and finalizing all sorts of stuff with my second novel, so it was a decidedly busy couple of years for me. But I would say it was certainly worth it--and that it probably wouldn't have turned out so well without all the hard work.
But it was really wonderful taking a book of fiction "with a mission" out there on tour (Adam and I did a pretty extensive tour, including some bookfairs), and bringing audiences not only some good writing, but also sparking actual conversation and debate about this particular moment in history, or controversial moments in the past. It was quite a learning experience for both of us--as novelists you don't always get that "non-fiction" crowd at readings. That is, people who want to talk and engage and be a part of an evening as opposed to just sitting back and hearing a story. So that part totally made it worth it, you know, going out and seeing that we brought together something that created some dialogue.
FRANKLIN: Yep. I haven't seen much financial gain, and the time-sucking aspect is huge. However, I've loved linking up with so many writers and finding more of a community within a solitary job. For me, the pay off has been in people and in the projects, which have turned out very well.
MCNALLY: Some probably aren’t worth the money or time to do (insert maniacal laughing here), but I’ve edited five so far and am starting to edit a sixth one soon. I didn’t make a dime – literally – on two of the anthologies I edited, and I made probably less than a thousand dollars on one of the others. Those three were with university presses, and I did them not for the money but because the projects themselves interested me. There’s usually one week while I’m editing the book when I wonder what the hell I’ve gotten myself into, but that usually passes. Usually.
SCHAPPELL: As usual conventional wisdom is warped. Yes, as the editor it takes a long time to edit an anthology, and no it doesn’t pay particularly well, but, come on, it’s not waiting tables or working on Wall Street.
As for the writer you must consider that they write an essay they may never have been inspired to write had it not been assigned them. Since the writer retains first serial rights many are able to sell those pieces to magazines for three sometimes four times what they were originally paid. And since magazines increasingly rely on anthologies for material—it’s a trove of already written, edited, copy-edited pieces ready to roll—it’s a great way to get an essay that might never have seen the light of day read by millions.
In each anthology that we’ve done writers have gone on to sell books based on their essays...so I think it’s a good deal.
Plus anthologies are perfect for Americans. The short form speaks to the American attention span and the fact that they are autobiographical feeds us unslakeable lust for other’s misery.
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Copyright © 2008 The Southeast Review
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