The Brain on Reading

Just as drugs temporarily change brain functioning, so does reading. But reading changes our brain in positive ways.

A group of Stanford neurobiologists, led by Michigan State's Natalie Phillips, put a slew of subjects into MRI machines and told them to read passages from Jane Austen's "Mansfield Park.

Naturally (and validating what book lovers everywhere already know), the researchers found that blood flow increased as the study participants read. It didn't matter whether the participants were reading leisurely or critically, blood flow increased beyond "just work and play." Reading, once again going above and beyond for its devotees. Blood flow really amped up when people read critically, reaching levels and areas used for problem-solving.

Brain activity ramped up across the whole brain, backing up assertions that have been made for thousands of years (the Ancient Romans knew a good deal about the topic) that study of the liberal arts has important benefits for the cognitive abilities of an individual.

While it is always nice to have scientific research to reference back to, this should not be new news. The kids walking around their house bumping into walls because they can't be bothered to look up from the book they are reading, the kids who get in trouble at school because they have unsuccessfully hidden their book inside a larger textbook, the kids who miss their bus stop at the end of the day because they are too absorbed in the world created by the pages they are reading...these are always the kids that grow into successful, logical, well-rounded adults.

Here are a couple of links with snippets about the study findings:
www.insidehighered.com/audio/2013/05/03/brain-and-reading
www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/14/reading-good-for-brain-_n_1884054.html


Immediate takeaway? We can all justify reading during our finals--it will help overall brain functioning and problem-solving abilities.

Bedtime Stories When We're Parents?

I found this little video clip on YouTube. I can't tell if it is a joke or serious--which shows just how plausible it is.

Is this the future of bedtime stories?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Dn7IhFswv90

Publishee to Publisher: Neil Gaiman's Take

I recently ran across this article about a speech Neil Gaiman gave at the London Book Fair about the future of publishing. I think Gaiman is absolutely correct when he talks about how the worst thing the book industry can do is to refuse "to understand that the world is changing."

Gaiman wants the industry to get experimental, get creative, and even to screw up--all to learn what will work. I love this. Isn't this what learning is all about? Trial and error until something rings true? That, at least, is the lesson I've taken away from all the books I've read so far in my life.

What do you think of Gaiman's ideas? Solid and logical, or irresponsible and brash?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/apr/16/neil-gaiman-urges-publishers-make-mistakes

Interview with Entrepreneur Michael Sherrod (Part One)

Rachel Talley: What has been your experience with publishing specifically? We went through your career and all that, but how has it specifically been with publishing?

Michael Sherrod: Well, when I got out of graduate school, and I went to the University of Columbia for my degree in journalism, which I picked because I wanted my job to be different every day. I wanted something new and different to happen every single day. I did not want to have the same year of experience over and over for forty years. I figured journalism was the best shot at that. But while I was in journalism school I realized I didn’t want to be a journalist, I wanted to be a publisher. I wanted to be the guy who figured out what the publication was about and guide the philosophy of the publication, guide the editorial tone of the publication. One of the reasons for that was because I loved typesetting, I loved working with designers and the only way to do that was to run the publication. Then you got to do everything, got to be involved in everything. I got to hire people smarter than me and got to let them do all the good work. So right out of grad school I started my first company, which was publishing a magazine. I needed to make money on my first issue or I would be bankrupt. I didn’t realize then, but it normally takes five years for a magazine to become profitable. It’s probably good I didn’t realize that because I was scared enough as it was. But we managed. The first day I went out and sold ads. I sold 12 one-year contracts. That felt good. And I was lucky, I was in a place where there was a lot of money, there were a lot of people with money who were interested in something new, a new publication attempt. I had done enough research to know, or I knew enough to know that there was a lot of wealthy people in the area. So the magazine was essentially about them. It was a Town and Country for West Texas, called The Odessa. We made money right off the first issue and just kept going. Before the first year was out I had started another company, which was a graphics company. There was a need for somebody to do typesetting--for the school system and for other groups in the city that didn’t have those capabilities. Then I started an ad agency with offices in Midland and Houston to service the oil industry because it was booming, much like it is now. I was about to close on a printing company when I got hit by a car. That put me in the hospital for a really long time. While I was in the hospital I got an offer for the company and I sold it. After selling a company, you have non-competes. So I couldn’t really stay in Odessa--I mean I couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t sell advertising, I couldn’t publish anything. Oh! And I started a fashion magazine. That was the other magazine I started. That was the single most successful publication, in terms of dollars to produce it and dollars earned on advertising. It was 85:1.

RT: Isn’t that the one you went to the other places and got their pictures or something?

MS: Yeah, I went to Women’s Wear Daily, yeah.

Allana Wooley: What was the name of that magazine?

MS: Women’s Wear Daily?

AW: The fashion magazine.

MS: It was called Fashion West. It was one of those true entrepreneurial opportunities where the retailers, the advertisers, had a real need to tell people what they had. The audience did not know they had it. I had the audience and I had the advertisers. All I had to do was bring them together in a publication. It was a slam-dunk from day one. I was going to actually take that all across the state of Texas. I was going to go to every college town in the state. You know--Austin, San Antonio, Lubbock--I was going to go everywhere with that. It was going to be that thing that really took my company to the next level. I only got to do one before I got hit by the truck. So, sold the company, moved here (since I couldn’t do anything out there anymore). Worked in an ad agency, to kind of learn the marketplace. Then I became a publisher of a Dallas newspaper called the Dallas Business Courier. I did that for a few years, started that from scratch. That was sold to the Dallas Business Journal, I mean to a business journal corporation that owns the Dallas Business Journal now. Then came over to the Fort Worth Star Telegram and sold advertising. Instead of being a publisher I became national advertising manager, or Vice President of National Advertising. What that was, I don’t know if you understand how newspapers work--big newspapers--but they have two rates. They have a local rate and a national rate. The national rate is much higher than the local rate. National advertising had a big hold. We competed with the Dallas Morning News for those advertising dollars. They had a much larger market than we did, but we charged three-quarters of the price they did. We were still enormously profitable. I did a couple of innovative things there that allowed me to sell more ads than anybody had up to that point in the national category. I was the first person to ever sell Southwest Airlines a schedule in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. That was because I went to talk to Herb Keller [sic]. Nobody ever thought he would meet with you. But he was the nicest man. He came down the stairs from his office to get me, we walked back up the stairs, he got me a coke, we sat down and his office was tiny. It was completely cluttered. On one chair over here was a moose head that was huge. We were kind of stuffed in. There was one chair available and him. We chatted for a while and he could not have been nicer; he was absolutely just a great gentlemen.

RT: Did you have a way in the door with him or did you just email/call and say ‘Can I meet with you?’

MS: I called his ad agency and I told them I wanted to meet with him. They were very reluctant to do that. They just don’t want you messing with the client. But I said we were really pushing for this. So they said okay and they gave me a number to call and he was “Sure! Come on in! Let’s talk!” He was just unbelievably friendly and awesome and relaxed and we chatted for a while and he was like ‘Yeah, I’ll take care of it.’ And they called and said ‘We’ll take a year’s contract.” It was like 9,000 inches. It was a huge contract. That was a big day. I also created a program--one of the problems we had when I’d go to ad agencies, and one of the great things about this job was I got to go to New York and California and Chicago and Seattle, anywhere there were big agencies and basically sell them. One of the things they always said was ‘Wait. We’re on the Dallas side of the market. Why do we need you?’ ‘Well, the Dallas Morning News only has 100 subscribers in Tarrant County.” And that was true. 100. And the Star-Telegram had none in Dallas. There was a dividing line in Arlington that was like a wall. So you’re missing, literally missing half the marketplace. Well, not quite half, but you’re missing this whole group of people. We had a lot of circulation. So they were like ‘Yeah, well, okay, I’ll think about it.’ So what I did, and back then, when cable was just beginning to get started, cable TV. The ads were unbelievably cheap. I went and made deals with the cable companies that we would buy advertising from them. For every national advertiser we sold we would get a TV ad from them. It cost like $12 for a 30 second ad. I mean, seriously. It was ridiculously--some of them were $5--ridiculously inexpensive. So I was able to go back to the advertisers and say, ‘Not only will you get an ad in the Star-Telegram, but you’ll also get cable on the Dallas side of the market. So actually, the Star-Telegram was the only paper that could get you on both sides of the market.’ They were like ‘Awesome!’ We just wrote contracts at every agency we went to. That was sort of an example of being an intrapreneur--working as an entrepreneur inside a company. I’ve done a lot of that. That’s why, I believe, entrepreneurship is not just starting a company, it’s about thinking like an entrepreneur. It’s about looking at the assets that you have, or that are available to you, and deciding how can I put those assets together in a way that is going to create revenue, save costs, do something better for our customers, whatever it may be, something to help the company grow and make money. That’s basically all I did. I looked around, looked at all the assets that were available, and said, ‘What can I do to make this a better package? To make this better for our customers and, ultimately, better for our readers?’ So, about 1986, the beginning of 1986. Star-Telegram had a thing called Star Text, which was a virtual private network. A virtual private network, what that meant was, you could have a set of computers in your building, and people who had the right pass code could access the content that was on those computers. It was pre-internet. So it was just a bunch of--they were called backs [sic]--that’s what they called those computers. They were huge--six feet tall, three feet wide. You plug in all these things to it and you could then have people come on with an account, just like you would at AOL or something like that. We had about 4,000 people who paid $10 a month to be on Star Text. What they could get was reading print on a black screen that was classifieds and news stories and sports stories. That’s it, that’s all it was. But people thought it was the coolest thing. You had to access it with a 200 gb modem [sic]--I know you don’t know what that is. In the old days you had a desk top, which would be huge. If you were lucky you had a laptop. But laptops cost from $8000 to $10000 back then. You plug in your network to the modem and you plug the modem into your computer. You would dial in a code and you would hear this ‘Whee-Shhh-Ding-Ding-Ding-Ding-Ding.’ Then it would go quiet and you would know you were connected. That was called dial-up. You used the telephone system.

RT: Oh! I had a dial-up.

AW: Yeah!

MS: It was pretty slow. You just do text. You want a picture, you go to bed and you wake up in the morning and it might be done. That’s all we did, but I sold an ad on there, to AT&T, that became the most successful ad I think I’ve ever sold, in terms of response. The response was unbelievable. AT&T had said, if you sell an ad and we get 25 responses to our offer we’ll consider it a huge success. What the offer was, was $10 coupon for free long-distance, or a 20% discount on a fax machine. You had to fill out a form, it took about 10 minutes, it was a really long form, to get the gift. We thought nobody was going to do it. We didn’t even know how many people had computers. We knew 4,000 did--who were signed up for Star Text--but that’s all we knew. So we put an ad in the business section and said, ‘Go to Star Text, free call to Star Text. Get this great offer from AT&T.’ Well, we thought, if five people did it we were going to consider that awesome. We didn’t ever think we’d get 25. By the end of the week 2200 people had looked at the ad and 635 had filled out the form. Nobody could believe it-nobody. AT&T was pissed. They only had a budget for 25 of these gifts. So we ended up actually paying AT&T to cover the cost of all of the other 650 gifts because we were so thrilled this was such a huge thing. This meant that we had opened up this whole new area of potentially, incredibly responsive, advertising. Phil Meek [sic] heard that. Phil Meek, at that time, he had been the publisher of the Star-Telegram, but he had been promoted in Cap Cities ABC body to New York to run all new publications. He heard about it and he called me up to New York to tell the world, we have this new thing, it’s awesome. When I stepped up in front of all these advertising managers from all these publications, I didn’t even get to finish the presentation and they were ready to throw me out the window. They were furious. What they saw was this new thing, this new electronic thing, that was going to cannibalize their ability to sell print ads and cut into their potential revenues. They hated it.

RT: Sounds familiar to the eBooks/Books fiasco.

AW: Right.

MS: And to this day newspapers have never figured it out. That was in 1986, they still haven’t figured out how to do the web right. With the exception, maybe, of The New York Times and The Guardian. That was a really big blow in our community for newspapers. They could have all been using...but anyway. I was disappointed; I had thought this was my ticket to the big time, to New York City. Once this thing took off, I would be running. I thought it was going to be a big career boost. It turned out to be not so much. So I was really disappointed. They cancelled the advertising program. But, the people at AMR Information Service heard about it. They were, AMR was the holding company of North America Allies [sic], and the Saber Travel Network, and a bunch of other stuff. They were starting this division called AMR information services that was going to do insurance, insurance services, back up calling, do private labeling of the Saber system for airlines around the world, and do ____ management for railroads in France. They were working on this thing called Easy Saver. They asked me to help them sell ads. They had never heard of anybody sell a digital ad before. They were like, okay, ‘Can you do that on Saver?’ Okay. Let’s figure it out. So we figured it out, and that’s now called Travelocity, but at the time it was Easy Saver. I did that for a few years and worked as Vice President of AMR Information Services and then left there in 1991 to start my own company. That was the NRRV [sic] system that I talked about. It stood for N___ Reader Response Vehicle. It was a vertical magazine. Essentially, in the old days, when you had a vertical magazine, that could be something like Labs Quarterly or Petroleum Engineer or something very specific. So a very vertical magazine. They had a thing called a bingo card in it. This was a blown in card that had a list of every advertiser in the magazine. If you wanted more information, you checked the box, tore out the card, and sent it back in to the publisher. Eight to ten weeks later you would get a packet of information that you had forgotten by then. You know, ‘Why am I getting information from XYZ company?’ Because you had forgotten you had filled out information on an airplane and sent it in. So what I did was create a website that did that for them. The vertical trade publishers would hire me and I would load all of the information onto my website and you could just download them, specifically. That worked pretty well. I sold that company to AOL in 1994. Through selling that company, I met a guy named Bob Smith, who wanted to start a local guide company called Digital City. I became one of the cofounders of that. We started it, actually started it, in 1996. Grew that to be about a 100 million dollar business in about three years and sold that to AOL. Then I went to work at AOL as part of that sell. So publishing is all part of this. I became a publisher of a local city guide, essentially, except it was on the web. That’s what I was doing, was publishing advertising for other advertisers and sort of warehouse, if you well. Everything I’ve done has had to do with publishing in one way or another, either print or electronic. Then from there I went to help create AOL local and worked in their, I ran their worldwide social media for three years. That was more about publishing tools. We were creating things like blogs and journals and message boards and member directories so people could talk to each other. We actually created a version of Facebook long before Facebook. Unfortunately, did not have the vision at the time to take it outside the pay wall. I couldn’t convince anybody that the community piece, the social media piece, of AOL was the most valuable piece of the company. They just didn’t believe me. But that’s where 90% of the subscribers to AOL spent their time. 90 percent. They [The bosses] thought it was useless, cheap. They knew it was a foundation but they could not think of anything advertisably viable would come out of it because there was all kinds of hate speech in parts of it, it was unregulated, it was the wild west kind of thing. You never knew what you were going to find. They just didn’t think brands would ever want their brands to be beside that kind of stuff.

AW: Hindsight.

MS: Yeah, twenty-twenty. I had a conversation with John Miller [sic] about that when he became CEO of AOL actually. I made a report to him about that. He just couldn’t see it. I said, ‘John, think about it. 90%, 90% of all the time spent behind the pay wall in AOL buyers and subscribers is in our community providers and services. Nine percent is spent over here in these content channels we have like health, personal finance, travel, all that kind of stuff. You guys think that’s where the value is? That’s not where the value is. It’s here.’ If Steve Casin [sic] had actually listened to that, we might not have had the TimeWarner debacle. Because instead of going by content that was essentially mirroring where nine percent of our users went, instead of 90%, we made a huge mistake.

RT: That’s interesting to me also, what it shows in terms of study versus talent in that area. Because those people you’re trying to convince in that area are obviously very studied and they probably had an education or had a career that really led up to that area. But this college kid just says ‘hey!’ and he just goes and he--

AW: Except he didn’t create it thinking about money, he created it for his friends for fun and then it turned into something that could be money.

MS: AOL?

AW: No. Facebook.

MS: Facebook? Yeah.

RT: It’s just interesting.

MS: Well, yeah. [Mark Zuckerberg] was interested in solving his own problem, not on making money. John Miller, Steve Casin, all those guys were focused on making money for their shareholders. The only place they were making money right then was not in community, they weren’t making any money in community. They were making all their money in this other place [content], so they made the judgement that we’re going to make more money doing the same thing! And it didn’t work out that way. They didn’t really listen to consumers. I don’t know that even if they had, that they would have had the guts to do it. They would have made one hell of a risky call. Really risky call.

RT: Yeah, definitely.

MS: So when you think, I mean, you probably don’t remember, you were probably a baby, but back in that period of time social media was nothing. It was nowhere. I remember I was interviewed by The New York Times about AOL’s community services and stuff and I was trying to explain to this guy how it was really an important part of AOL and blahdyblahdyblah. He was just dismissive. No. Forget it. Not gonna happen. And it wouldn’t have happened at AOL behind the pay wall. We already had that. Until we made the decision to go outside of it, it wouldn’t have worked. We would have had to make that decision to go outside of it. They didn’t do that until 2004.

RT: That’s interesting. We’ve heard a lot of the changes just through what you’ve said and what you’ve seen, just all the innovations you’ve been able to make, what do you think--Do you have any forecasts for the future? What do you think is coming? A lot of these things have changed just in the past [couple of] years.

This is Part One of the interview. For Part Two, see Rachel Talley's blog.

Earlier today I  found myself thinking about why we refer to books as an old technology and therefore lacking in their capacity to attract younger, hipper, tech-savvy readers.

Art galleries, theater productions, orchestra concerts...all of these are old art forms that still appeal to wide masses today. Although many aspects of how they are created and presented to the public have been jazzed up to fit with the style and preferences of culture today, art shows, concerts, and plays still manage to attract an audience. Even those who aren't huge fans or experts in the respective fields these art forms represent attend and enjoy public shows. We don't claim that art is ineffective today just because it is created with the same old paints and on the same old canvases that have been used for centuries.

Why is that?

I think one answer might be the magnitude and capacity for interaction with these shows. What if libraries became book meccas? What if libraries were places that had books and quiet spaces to read, but also focused on reading groups, cross-media engagement with texts, hosting public readings, offering writing workshops, and idea sharing.

I wonder (and this is a big 'I wonder,' as I may be totally off base) what would happen to libraries if they transformed into places it was an event to go to. Libraries could intermingle performance (public readings and open mic nights) with history (having visuals to walk through the process of making a book/how books came to look like books), practice (writing workshops and reading groups), with intake (quiet spaces stuffed with books for reading and meditating, and rooms with music and movies and art already labeled and connected to specific books).

I imagine this would be an incredibly unfeasible task. There are many flaws with this idea. But I also imagine that such a library would be a beautiful place to be. I think we should make a bigger deal out of reading than we do. Too often, I think, we grow complacent in the knowledge that books are all around us; we make assumptions that books are always the same, will always be the same, and that the main point of learning to read is to become capable at life basics (such as reading the how-to guide for one's new 60" plasma screen TV) and well-studied in other academic areas.

What would happen to reading if we had sustained, well-publicized access to dynamic reading events?

Our Job

In class we are continuously talking about the future of the industry. The vast majority of us want to one day work with the printed word, be it in book, newspaper, magazine, or web formatting. It’s only natural that we are so highly invested in what happens to publishing. Not only are we interested in pursuing this as a career path, but it also involves some of the things we love the most. Books! Most, if not all, of us live to read and can’t fathom a world where books aren’t ubiquitous and freely/cheaply available. And our generation, consumers of these products of publishing and educated about the system itself, will one day hold the positions of power that make decisions about the future of books.

Class guest and entrepreneur Michael Sherrod said some really interesting things when we were interviewing him. One of these was that we have to think beyond what we know to what is new and innovative, but we can’t present the general public with a concept or product that they aren’t ready for yet. He had this issue with AOL’s social media component. It was the most trafficked part of the entire website (attracting 90% of page visitors) but it was only available to users who owned a computer, had internet access, and had paid AOL to get behind their paywall. That was enough for AOL to turn a profit, but it wasn’t enough to mean immediate success if expanded. So Sherrod’s idea of advertising on this social website (one of the very first) wouldn’t have worked unless AOL was willing to take a huge risk and open the unregulated site to those who weren’t behind the paywall. Sherrod wasn’t able to sell his idea to AOL executives anyway! They wouldn’t listen to him, stuck in their old, traditional ways of doing things that always worked and so couldn’t see the potential right before their faces.

Knowing that we will be creating the business of words in the future, in some form or fashion, we can take a lot of valuable lessons from Sherrod’s experience. First, we can’t be like the jaded AOL executives. We have to let go of some of our traditional ways of thinking about the publishing industry or we will be bypassed by something fresher, newer, and way more exciting, leaving us a deteriorating relic of what once was. Gomez said it in Print is Dead: we cannot be complacent in success, and we cannot just fall back on solutions from the past.

There is a reason why books published today don’t read like any of Shakespeare’s plays or Dumas’ epic adventures. Those styles wouldn’t be relatable to where the world is today. The content details (although story arcs are story arcs however you slice them), style of writing, formatting, marketing strategy, and basically everything else has radically changed in the past few centuries. We can still read and enjoy classics of the past because we know that they are classics of the past. We know that when we finish reading we will slide the volume back onto our bookshelf (or send it back to our virtual bookshelf) right next to a Harry Potter or John Green or Markus Zusak or Barbara Kingsolver or whoever else novel. Editors have kept an eye to culture and demand; it’s time the entire publishing company did that as well. Editors are already (and need to amp up the creativity and innovation) interested in what the general public wants to read and how they want to read it. Designers need to focus on how people want to consume a product. Marketing experts need to look at what people are craving, getting into the things people don’t even know that they want yet. The best way to do this, in my opinion, is to get the buyers and consumers and readers of words involved. Doritos has a really successful product because they do just this--fans can submit their own potential Superbowl commercials and suggest new products. What if books were the same way? Let us ask the people what they want, use our liberal arts molded brains to analyze and synthesize those responses to come up with what people want. This is how to ensure the publishing industry stays alive and strong for years to come.

Now don’t get me wrong, there is something to be said for catering to hard core book fans who don’t want change. I feel confident that this marketing and publishing target will continue; we will still be able to buy the paper books and crack spines and read traditionally presented text. But we are among the remnant few who would be reading anyway. Most of the ideas I am suggesting, in terms of positive changes for publishing, are simply ways to keep the public reading after they have graduated high school or college and to entice new generations to grow up reading and loving books, occasionally putting down their video games to pick up a book. Whatever a book might look and act like in the future, anyway.

Listening to what people actually want, will buy, and read will require a lot of work and constant evolving for the industry. I think we are past a stage where we can have an innovation last a century or more. The world is changing at a much faster rate than it used to, and so must the publishing industry.

We have to think outside of the box. And thank goodness we (our class and the many classes like it around the world) truly love books. Exposure to books, past and present, expands our repertoire of knowledge, innovation, and imagination. Reading the words and ideas of others helps us generate words and ideas of our own. Passion breeds sustainability.

Endangered Species

We’ve talked so much about the future of books that it got me thinking about the future of another book-related item currently ubiquitous in our population: bookcases. With the decline in book sales and the move to digital storage of books, what will happen to this piece of furniture? Originally, it must have developed to fit the book mold and demand for a way to hold and display the new commodity, the book, that everybody was suddenly able to get their hands on.

I love bookcases. Granted, I love bookcases because I love books and bookcases are servants to their book masters. Still, I do not want to see bookcases go the way of coat racks, china cabinets, and typewriting desks. I want bookcases to continue to prosper and survive forever. They aren’t as easily digitalized as books are (though both the Kindle and Nook have tried) and so more concrete, implementable and physical uses must be thought up as digitalization spreads.

Here are a few of my own ideas:

-Boats: Bookcases can be flipped up to form perfect sitting nooks for passengers on the modified raft. Hard book covers can even be used for oars.

-Baby cradles: Having multiples is hard enough. Why waste extra expense buying three separate baby cribs when you can just flip a small bookcase over and be all set?

-Feeding troughs: Those multiples are going to grow up and need to eat real food. And boy, will they be messy! Plop some food in the bookcase and let the little tikes chow to their heart’s desire. Afterwards, just spray the case down. No muss, no fuss.

-Planters: So you want to grow zucchini, carrots, and squash? But you’re OCD and terrified of inter-vegetable root tangling? Get a bookcase! Each shelf can be earmarked for a different plant!

This threat of extinction goes far beyond bookshelves. What about the future of bookmarks? The longevity of book lights? What remaining life can be expected for bookends? These are just a few tragic examples of all of the species lined up and awaiting their sad demise in the face of digital takeover.

I have been reading for well over a decade and have accumulated quite a few of these book accessories, accessories I store on top of the beautiful, simple cedar bookcase that (barely) houses and protects my personal library. This bookcase is one of my very favorite things in my room. Besides my bed, my bookcase is also the most dominating item in my room, taking up a whole half a wall plus a dome of floor space in front for insured ease of book access. When digital becomes an even more omnipresent force than it is now, what will people do with this extra space in their living and bedrooms? Will they get even bigger beds? Even larger TV screens? Or will the space still be devoted to reading--perhaps with a comfy chair perfect for curling up in a ball to peruse the digitalized text that will represent our only physical manifestation of books (A temporary manifestation lasting only as long as it takes our eyes to scan over a page and our fingers to flip to the next screen.)?

I don’t think we all need to run out to Half-Price Books and stock up on the spines we can balance between our hands and chins just yet: the book apocalypse will not occur for quite some time--and in fact may never occur. It is something to consider though. If literary-providing powerhouses such as Barnes & Noble’s are having serious financial issues, it can be assumed that time will only lead to more and more Borders-like shutdowns. We, current readers, still resist digitalization to some degree because we have known something else. We grew up ingrained with the knowledge of what the feel of a page rubbed between two fingers is like. That physical connection is a huge part of what books mean to us, but this will not be the case for our children and their children. Change is coming for future generations. I guarantee it.

Books are great; both in physical and pixellated formats. Digitalization isn’t all bad. But I think it is a worthwhile endeavor to try and picture what the future might look like. If we don’t like what we see we need to start thinking of ideas NOW for how to change this projected image. Now, before it is too late and physical books have officially moved from the threatened, to the endangered, and finally to the extinct list.

What do you think the future of books will look like?

Author Interview--Dr. Chantel Langlinais

This is a long but compelling transcription of a long but compelling interview with TCU English Professor Dr. Chantel Langlinais. I'll post again in a few days hitting some of the highlights of the interview. For those interested parties: here it is in its entirety:

Allana Wooley: The class is Books and Print Culture. We’re looking at the history of the book and the future of books and where it’s going. We’ve just gone through the history of printing presses and how the book took shape. It’s actually pretty cool, he collects old artifacts and he just brought several of those in, just folios and old books where you can see the hand stitching. Just looking at a lot of that and how the market kind of commodifies the process of selling books and now it’s turned into so much online and internet reading and people read less and people have so much shorter attention spans and the ebooks and Kindles and things like that. We’re just kind of looking at where the book is situated in culture.

Could you give us a list of the types of things that you write, and what you have written and had published?

Chantel Langlinais: Well I have written poetry, most actually what has been published has been my poetry, and it’s been done, it kind of correlates to a couple of things that y’all have already talked about. Online publications, we’re seeing that more and more. I started with, when I was in graduate school, we actually put out a student journal much like they do eleven40seven here. So my first publications came from that and then when I graduated that’s really where we started to see more and more of that transition online and so a lot of publications came to be more and more online and so my poetry is online. So I have a few poems there. And I also have, a friend of mine started a small press, it’s called a Nouszot Press. And she does, going back to what you were saying Dr. Williams is talking about, actually hand-assembling texts. So she took a chapbook of my poetry and a chapbook of my friend’s poetry and she worked with us on the design and on the colors, how we wanted the text to appear on the cover, and she actually hand-stitched all of the books together. I don’t know if I, I don’t think I have a copy with me here. But, um, you know it was interesting because it just kind of goes back to those early versions you were talking about where they were actually hand-assembling every one of them. I don’t have one here, but she would have taken one just like this and there’s string, she would have strung them with a piece of string, she assembled them that way. So she did like 50 of those and so it’s a painstaking process but it’s also a beautiful process because you’ve actually created the intertext and she’s created the intertext on the outside, sort of how it’s put together.

One of the first chapbooks that I did, this was in an Art of the Book class in grad school and again we got to design our own text. We got to pick the colors, pick how we wanted it assembled and I worked with a friend of mine who was a photographer and she interpreted my poetry through photography and so along with the poems there will be corresponding images of how she saw the poems visually. So those are some of the projects I’ve done, I tend to like to collaborate with other people and then we will get projects sort of put together and presented that way. But yeah, I’ve done a little bit of both and more of my stuff that I’ve had published has been chapbook publications and online publications.

Rachel Talley: You did that one that was like a Facebook one.

CL: Oh Facebook Poetics! I did that, let’s see, I think I did that back in 07 or 08, but it was called Facebook poetics and I’ve been working with these same other three poets pretty much over the past few years but we found ourselves corresponding online a lot and I said, well wouldn’t it be neat if we tried to do some creative project via Facebook? Because now I’m here, I’ve got two friends of mine in Louisiana and one is now in Malaysia, so we obviously don’t get to see her very often. So what we decided to do was, my friend Ronda is a photographer, and I do a little bit of photography, but one of the two of us would post a picture and then in the comments section we would each write a stanza of a poem and so we back and forth wrote one text that was going to be one poem and we just kind of fed off each other in terms of style and content. We all have very different styles of writing, so it was interesting to see what developed out of it. That’s actually still up on my Facebook page. It’s under an album titled ‘Facebook Poetics’ and we created this online social networking compilation of poetry and photography. It was fun, a fun project.

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AW: Who or what inspires you as an author?

CL: Oh my goodness. It’s interesting now because a lot of what inspires me are my colleagues and my friends that I actually work with, and their the ones that keep me writing and keep me working. I actually get really drawn to visual images. This Climped The Kiss (?) that one painting got me moving on an entire dissertation project which was looking at how images, and imagining what the characters inside the image could exist on the stage and how they could exist outside the time period in which they were constructed. I like to go to galleries and look at images and think about how those characters could appear on the stage. Right now, a lot of what I’m reading is just what my colleagues have written. I read Dr. Lemon’s book Happy. I’ve read some of my chapbooks that some friends of mine are working on. Really, for me, it’s just sort of immersing myself in different types of texts. Visual text, written text, photography. I’ve gotten really interested in photography and trying to think different ways in how that could be integrated into another project. So I’m a little bit of everywhere in where I get my inspiration from and what influences me as a writer.

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AW: Who or what motivates you as an author?

CL: Again, it’s going to go back to seeing what my colleagues are working on and that inspires me to work on my own texts. I really like to go back to collaboration because, so many people talk about how writing can become very isolating, it’s very personal, you kind of hole yourself up into a quiet place and have your own time. That’s important but I also try to integrate with social aspects that I want to continuously work with other people because that motivates me to work, it motivates me to see how other people’s styles are coming into play and how we can merge those together. I try to think of different ways to think what photographers do I know, what musicians do I know, what filmmakers do I know. For me, that becomes a learning process. It also becomes a less isolating and more social experience. We learn from each other. I love seeing how different people interpret the same object and how different people interpret an image or film. What we can create together becomes exciting for me and it helps me, it just makes it more social for me and it makes me more motivated. Right now I’m working with some friends where we’re just going to try and create an online blog just generating ideas and from those ideas just see what project we can come up with. I find that helpful just because I am social and I get really busy. To find that niche of time everyday, for me to write, by myself--I don’t always get that. If I know that I’m working with a group of people, I tend to get more constructive with my time and more useful of my time.

RT: That’s so interesting because in Finding Neverland you get that image of where he is in his room, by himself, very isolated. I feel like you’re one of those, the more social writers that I know.

CL: I’ve been writing since I was really young. I mean, I’ve been writing, I can’t remember when I wasn’t writing. Probably really started writing when I was eleven or twelve, just in  poetry. It was not, it’s nothing I would resurface. But just that beginning, you’re starting to get creative, because I was always in dance and I was always interested in taking pictures and writing and just imagining different stories. But poetry was my first form that I used and genre that I went to. But I did for so long write by myself. And I did write in those journals and I did seclude myself in that space. But after years and years of that isolation I found the need to be more social with it, for myself. I found that to be, it wasn’t that it was more enjoyable, but it was that I, I enjoyed working with other like-minded people. I enjoyed the process of seeing how we could develop something so different from one another. That interests me and excites me. That’s why I like putting my students in groups sometimes. Just to see what they can come up with collectively. It makes that creative process less isolating and more social. That idea, I’ve just always been interested in that, just to see what happens.

AW: How do you feel about your work when you do collaborative versus the work that you do when you are isolated?

CL: That’s a great question because I’m harder on myself I think when I’m by myself. I haven’t really thought through why this is but I tend to be less judgmental when I’m working with other people because, I don’t know why... I think we’re always critical of our texts and especially when it’s a creative text and it’s so personal and you’re so connected to it and you spend all this time with it. Maybe that’s what it is. Maybe I have more time to sit with it and reflect on it and think about it. Versus when I’m working with a group, I kind of just, you just kind of start getting stuff out there and there’s not as much of that alone time thinking was that bad? Should I have used a different sentence there? Should I have taken that picture a different way? So that’s possibly why I could be, but that’s a really good question. I’ll have to think about it. But I think maybe it does have to do with the amount of reflection time. I think in groups you’re working at a quicker pace because you’ve got other people feeding off of you, so you want to get something out there and you’re not sitting there as long thinking about one word or one sentence or one page of text.

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AW: What authors or books influenced you as an author the most?

CL: The chapbook I last did was called Turning 25. What I did was I took basically, 25 was the age my dad passed away. I took 25 texts that I kind of read and that became significant to me during that time period of his absence and that helped me with my creative process and I actually used those to construct the poems, or to help me construct the poems that I wrote. Some of the texts in there were probably ones of the most influential. Paul Oster (?) has a book called The Invention of Solitude and it’s interesting with that text because, you know it’s been about 16 years since my dad passed away, so it’s been a long period of time. I remember back to that time, people were giving me all those grief books, oh loss of dad, loss of parent. I would read like two pages and then toss them aside like yeah, okay, I don’t want to read this. And then somebody, I don’t know how it came about but like a year or two later I just, somebody had mentioned I think in my graduate school experience I think Paul Oster as an author. I remember liking his style and I just happened upon The Invention of Solitude and it’s such a beautiful book because it talks about--there’s this great line on memory, it’s something like “Memory as a body, as a skull.” It talks about memories as this space, almost like a tangible space that I was able to wrap my mind around and he constructs the book where the first half of the book is him talking about the loss of his own father. The second half of the book is him taking on a more fictional, narrative, more removed way of talking about his dad. So he moves from the personal to the impersonal. I loved the language of that book and I loved that it was looking at dealing with loss in a more poetic way, in a more creative way versus, okay these are the steps you’re going to go through. At the time, that, for me and still today, I’ll go back and reread. It’s just beautifully constructed, it’s like it captured everything I was feeling and articulated it in a way that I couldn’t. That was one of my, and still is one of my favorite books. I’m very drawn to Rene Marie Wilka (?). He’s got Letters to a Young Writer. He talks a lot about just the writing process and all of those insecurities and those ups and downs we go through. Again, it’s the way he articulates it that I’ve always enjoyed. Sylvia Plath is another person that tops my list. Emily Dickinson. That Paul Oster text is really kind of seminal in my writing and the way, because I’ve always been drawn to memory pictures, the process of loss. He put it in a way that I wouldn’t have imagined articulating it. It’s a great book.

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AW: Most often, where, when, and how do you write?

CL: I flip back and forth between still handwriting and computer writing. I actually, I’ve got so many journals. Mostly because people will give them to you as gifts when they know you’re a writer. Each journal became something different. One journal was a series of drawings. I’m not a great drawer, but I like just sketching stuff, just generating ideas that way. Another one is lines that I’ve heard that I like, and another one is me just jotting down ideas for something. It’s funny because somebody told me I’m the worst of two worlds. I’m very organized but I’m also creative. So they were just like “You’ve just got the worst! That’s terrible to have both of those things--to be an organized, creative person must be a struggle.” Even my texts, I’m organized that way--I’ve got a journal for this, a journal for this. My poetry I tend to type it on a computer just because I like to visually see what’s it’s going to look like. Sometimes I’ll handwrite that, but for the most part I like to see how it’s going to look on the page. I play with my line breaks that way, my page breaks that way, the lengths of the lines that way, how, if I’m going to do stanzas or no, if I’m going to use rhyme or not. A lot of that visually makes sense on the frame of the screen. When I write, I tend to write more at night. Pretty late, I’m very much a night person. I’ve heard people say to be more structured, get up early, write before you go to work, I can’t do that. My brain is not quite functioning then. But it’s late at night, especially after I’ve watched interesting films, or if I’ve been to a reading, things that make me think in those creative spaces and I want to come home and work on something. I’m not as regimented now as I would like to be. I know most writers you’ll talk to will say I write everyday from this time to this time. I don’t quite get in everyday, and I know I need to. But once the semester gets going it becomes a little more challenging for me to do that.

AW: Do you find that the content of what you write is different when it’s by hand, or when it’s by keyboard?

CL: I think so. When I’m writing by hand I’m not playing as much with the visual aspect of it. It’s when I’m writing on computer, it’s interesting because with the computer space you can see what it’s going to look like on the page. When I’m writing, handwriting, I am playing a little bit with line breaks and word choice but mostly I’m just filling the space of the journal and I’m just kind of getting the ideas out there. I think it changes. I think I do more of my editing when I’m working on the computer, as I’m going than I will when I’m just handwriting or freewriting.

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AW: How is technology changing print culture, specifically regarding authors and readers?

CL: Well, I mean, and this is going to be me personally, there are different people on this side of the camp--I still like books in my hand. I like to interact with books. I like to write notes to myself in the margin. I like to underline parts of the text that I really enjoy, that I want to go back to, that meant something to me, had some significance to me. I don’t feel I can do that on a Kindle or online just reading an article. It’s funny because I still have students that I work with, creative writers, or even just my composition students. I ask them to give me a hard copy because I have that need for interaction with the text in that way. I know things are moving more and more online but I just have a relationship with the books in my hand that there’s more of a, kind of a connection in my hand versus what I can do {gestures to computer screen}. I feel that way with photography too. It’s strange but when you just hold up a digital camera, for me, I like to actually have the viewfinder up to my eye. It’s something about that physical connection with the text and with the object when I’m working that I like to have. Maybe that’s just because that’s how I grew up with my books, but, yeah, it’s just really hard for me to make that transition over into that internet culture. I know I’m going to need to, I know it’s bound to happen. Look at the library just did away with thousands and thousands of books because they’re going to make room, they’re making more room for physical space for students to go and a lot of those books are going to be archived. They’re still going to exist there but it is changing with the times. I feel that eventually I’m going to have to change but for right now I’m pretty hard-pressed to have my book in my hand. Something about that experience has still stuck with me.

RT: Do you think about that when you write? Do you write and think, Oh somebody could read this on a Kindle, or do you just write with the mindset that I’m writing?

CL: No, I write with the mindset that I’m writing. But that’s a good question because there’s something that I really enjoyed about the process of when my friend put together that chapbook. There’s something about the assembly of it. What is it going to look like? What color are we going to use? How are we going to bind it? How is the text going to look on the page? That mattered as part of the process. Those kinds of decisions, while they are still there graphically, visually, but the binding is not. How we see it compiled it is going to change.

RT: Yeah, it’s an art form of itself. That used to be so treasured.

CL: Agreed. And what kind of paper are you going to use? It was all part of a construction from beginning to end. Your words in there, yes, and then when you’re done with all that, how is it going to appear on the page? And the time they took with all that, to make the paper and to process it, and to assemble it. We’re losing that. I know people that love to have the accessibility of it, and to have all their books in one space. There’s advantages and disadvantages, I think, to both. But for me, I’m still kind of hanging on to the books.

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RT: When you write, who is your intended audience?

CL: I think I feel like I’m writing for--I still feel myself writing for the group I worked with, which was just other creative people of my age group. I think a lot of times I’m just writing for me and then out of that I hope that their will be an audience. But a lot of my work I kind of just write for myself or I write as part of a social project. From there, like with the Facebook Poetics, I wasn’t thinking about who would respond and who wouldn’t respond. We thought it would be interesting though, if other people just started commenting on it. Then we were trying to decide, Okay, would that become part of the poem? If somebody just kicks in and says ‘Oh, I like it! Cool picture! What are y’all up to?’ We were discussing if that happens, does that become part of the text? We decided it probably might because that is how we were creating it. I think it just depends what I’m working on. If it’s online, if it’s the Facebook page, it could have been anybody that’s my audience, but I tend to write more for myself, I think. I kind of repeated that over, but you know it’s hard. I know there are some people who, when they move in with fiction or if it’s a play then I might think, Okay yeah this is going to be my intended audience, this is how I’m going to develop the language and subject matter and how I choose to approach the story. With the poetry I write a lot for myself and then if there is an audience then great.

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RT: How is the current technological revolution changing your audience?

CL: The best example of that would be the Facebook Poetics. That changed, that changed, that became a way of ‘How can we take something that is currently culturally relevant and do something creative with it?’ That’s what we did. Blog, I think what we’re hoping to do with the blog, there’s about five of us right now. I don’t know what’s going to come out of it, but I think we’re just going to play for a little while and see what can happen. I think in that way it’s keeping us connected and we’re trying to use different technological avenues to stay connected but also what and how can we create out of that process. On the total flip side of that, there’s a friend of mine and I who are going to work on something. There was a call out for, there’s a journal called Techniculture. It’s online. But they have a call out for proposals was going back to a time when there wasn’t technology the way that we have it today. So I started trying to think, my friend that is overseas, how would we completely annihilate technology and work together the way we normally worked before, which has been all online? Then I have an old typewriter at home and I’m like, ‘Okay, well I can use an old typewriter.’ We’d have to default by mail, which would take a while. There would be long responses in between each other. It affects how you communicate. Even writing on a typewriter again, I was playing with that the other day. It’s one of those that has the big spaces in between so you’re literally hunt and pecking. I was doing it with my index fingers. The cool experience about that was that I spent more time on each word, I spent more time on each sentence then normally I would have typing where I would go really quickly. It made me think as I was going more because it stopped me from how fast I could write. So I want to go back and play with that and see what comes out of it too.

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RT: What do you think reading and authorship will look like 50 years from now?

CL: It seems to me, with the way the trend has been going, it seems to me like we are going to have the majority of our texts online. I don’t know that the book, I’d be hard pressed to say that we’re not going to have books anymore. I hope we have books. But it seems to me, more and more, with the trend--and even with teaching, most of what we did, paperwork-wise, has gone online. Our books are starting to go online. It seems to me that we’re going to have continuously more and more of that. Maybe with the way technology goes, we’re going to have just more virtual turning of the pages instead of actually having the text in our hand. In one of my composition classes we’re talking about second life/virtual worlds and so maybe there will be a virtual world where the pages of the text come alive on the screen. We’ll move through the story and the visuals accompany the words.

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RT: How did you find a publisher and how long did that process take?

CL: I’m going to be a little different answering that question. I haven’t had a book published. I’ve had a chapbook published. I’m working on getting a play published, but I’m going to get it performed first. I’m trying to get it performed here on campus. If not through the TCU Theatre Department then through the TCU English Department. With me, I went through online journals, just looked at calls for submissions that way and then a friend of mine who I was collaborating with happened to start a small press and through her I got the chapbook published. I kind of lucked out on that end, it was more just through the connections that I made. I think a lot of that has been helpful. The people you know, the connections you can make can help you. Readings you go to, conferences you go to, sometimes if somebody hears your work you can get called for publication that way too. That’s been my route. Book route would be better to ask Alex Lemon or Matthew Pitt to ask that question. They’ve gotten actual books, books published.

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RT: How much did your manuscript change after it was sent to be published? With the editorial process of publishing and stuff, after you worked with your friend?

CL: A lot of my editing took place, it took me about a year – or maybe longer – to work through the poems. She, with the poetry, she has given me – she’ll give me a piece of advice on a line or a word choice, but really that’s about it when it comes to that. With fiction, I think you have more – that editing process takes place in a different way. With the poetry it was more like suggest a line break or suggest a word choice, but it wasn’t a lot of editing. What she would do was, I sent her my 25 poems and she would come back with recommended slashes through it, and really from that time process it was maybe a month later turnaround. By the time I went back and revised it. We back and forth. Email is so easy now to communicate back and forth, so that process is made a lot quicker.

RT: Is it the same thing for your plays, or the one that you are going through right now specifically?

CL: The play was a year and a half of writing, and that literally got revised – I was writing it and I had a deadline of May and up until that February or March I was still revising. I mean I literally like a month or two before it was supposed to be done, I cut out 2 characters. It started with like 15 people, it went down to 4, and then the final was 2. I mean I just knew there were just too many people. So, let’s condense it. So, who do I wasn’t to condense it down to? Picked that group. And then I found that the 2 girls I had going side-by-side with these 2 other characters, I didn’t find them to be necessary. So the focus just became – and it came back kinda to that painting – the focus became between Vincent and Elena and they took on all the roles of all the paintings, because all of the paintings had either a man and woman or just a woman. So, really only needed those 2 characters. So, that was – and I actually included (It’s called the abandoned drafts, in the back of the text) I included where the work started and finished. It was completely different from the beginning to the end. It’s kinda fun to see the process, and go back to the beginning and see that “Oh, yeah, that wasn’t good.”

RT: That was actually one of my favorite things that we did with our portfolios – putting what the piece started out as and getting to see where it finished. I know mine seemed unrecognizable.

CL: It is. And with the play a lot of what was useful with that (and that is why I still like to do this in my workshops) is performing it. Because then you can see ok, that line doesn’t sound realistic, or we don’t really need those characters, or how they fit into the text. That’s the advantage with the playwriting – is you get to hear words outloud and performed outloud and you’ve got the literal visual text in front of you and you can revise that way. You can revise as you’re watching it. So, its helpful to see that right out loud.

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AW: Do you have definite and specific organization and structure in mind as you begin writing. If so, how definite and specific is your outline?

CL: I don’t know. It differs. When I’m writing by myself, I think I’m going to say no. I do whatever. I write how I want, I write for however long I want. When I’m working with a group, it becomes more “Ok, we’re gonna do this once a week for this amount of time, and we’ll respond this kind of way this time and this kind of way a different time.” So, I think it varies depending on if I’m working with somebody or not. Because I’m not very structured by myself, I tend to be more structured when I’m working with other people.

RT: You almost have to be…?

CL: Yeah, which is funny in itself, because I even write more structured when I’m working with other people, but she [Rhonda – the woman I work with] is very Freudian, associations, very playful, just completely out there so it’s funny because I will try to organize us into this is what we are going to do and we’re going to do it on this blog and on this day and she is very free-associative and will do whatever she wants and just kinda goes about it. So…but when I’m by myself I’m not quite as anal as when I work with other people.

AW: That’s probably part of the cooperative process, different types coming together to bring different things.

CL: Yeah, and that’s what’s fun. And she – I learn so much about myself in it, and it makes me play more in it, because I am very structured in how I write and she’s not, she opens different doors for me to see the possibilities. Why don’t you try to play a little more? Let me challenge myself and push myself out of my box and see if I can do what you’re proposing I do. Now her writing doesn’t change much, but I feel like the influence of other writers certainly does help you to try different things. Whether they work or not is a different story, but the fun of it is the creative process.

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AW: How would you describe your writing process? I think you might have already…

CL: I think I did. Did you want me to clarify anything?

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AW: Do you have any writing habits or rituals that help the process?

CL: I don’t like bright lights. I tend to write by lamps, lamplight. I need some sort of dim light, like it would be hard for me to write in this room. I need it to be quiet, or instrumental music. Nothing with words, or really anything that is busy around me, because I can’t focus. I like to write by myself – secluded space. It’s really only social when I’m on the computer working with other people. Sometimes, I light candles. But I don’t have like a – if I’m not at the computer, I usually am in like a recliner or a chair by a light – a lamplight. Usually late at night. Really quiet, and nothing else moving or going on – except for maybe the cat. 

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AW: Do you write in multiple genres? I know you do poetry and drama - 

CL: Poetry, drama, I’ve done one non-fiction piece but that was a while ago. So yeah  poetry and drama are my genres.

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AW: What was your first publication and what do you think of it now?

CL: Oh gosh. My first publication was the 1997 San Antonio Competition Fair Anthology, and I actually went. They had us read outside. I’m not a fan of the poem right now, but I have a special affection towards it because it was my first published piece. But today looking back, it’s just…yeah um very rhymed, very structured, 4 line stanzas, repetition at the beginning of each line. It’s just very different from how I write today. Today I try to push myself out of the box, and I try to just play with different forms and that one was um…yeah.

RT: How old were you?

CL: I was 26. 25/26. It was very rhymed. It was aimless mysticism, I don’t know. It was just rhymed, very rhyme-y, had line rhymes, 4 line stanzas, very structured, very yeah. Yeah.

RT: Everyone’s ideal poem – yes, you can rhyme.

CL: It’s funny because so much when you’re taking Creative Writing classes they’re like push yourself out of rhyme schemes, it’s ok to rhyme but it’s a default in poetry – all poems have to rhyme and all poetry has to be structured in this way. I was very big into the 4 line, 4 stanza form for a while. No idea why. But that’s how I wrote for the longest time.

AW: Do you ever go back through your writing history and look at your work – does it sort of “clump” into this was sort of the four line/four stanza time, and then for this many years I did this style…?

CL: Yeah, I did that, and then when I got to Graduate school I very much became influence by people I worked with and started to play more and I have very different instructors. One of my instructors was extremely experimental, one of my instructors like us to pool from pop culture, which that I still do. Like he’d have us watch and try to integrate. There was a film on gypsies, he had us listen to Hank Williams, he have us pool words and phrases or images from these different pieces and try to create and construct around them. And for the whole semester we had to choose to use these 5 words in every poem. It was like lemon, crown, queen. I mean, he gave us the words we had to use. And so that was really fun, but the other experimental instructor, he had us all over the place. So, for the longest time, I was making these very non-narrative, non-linear experimental texts. And I held on to that for a couple of years. I mean he had do things like, he’d have us – one exercise was – put the TV on, have lots of books around you, listen to conversations, and you would take words, like words like that you heard on TV, or pick up a book and what’s the word there, what’s someone saying, and you construct something out of that. It was very … yeah, not very linear, not very cohesive. Just playing. It was playing – playing with the language. And I think I needed that to push me outside of what I was use to. I mean, it helped me play with language in a different way, but I did get stuck in for a pretty long time. And I remember, when I was finishing up my Masters him even asking me, “Are you planning on moving on to something different, because you’ve been in this style for a while?” I was like, “Yeah, I think I’m done, I think I’ve let it run its course.” But it changed the way I used the language. It pushed me away from that 4 line/4 stanza and allowed me to look at things in a different way, and it made me more open-minded to post-modern poetry. I see with students – same with experimental theatre – students always know what to do with it. Just a different way of composing. Just a different way of using the language. It’s playing. It’s creating different possibilities.

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RT: Besides teaching and authorship, have you had any other jobs in the writing field?

CL: No, I’ve been teaching since I’ve gotten out of college. I started in Middle School, I did some just random jobs in between. No, I don’t think so. I’ve pretty much always been in the education system and working with writing or talking about writing, I was in the Sylvan Learning Center. I helped kids with writing their papers. Pretty much from the beginning working with it, yeah.

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RT: Do you have anything else you’d like to share with us?

AW: Gems of wisdom?

CL: Gems of wisdom? Oh my goodness. I think if there was one thing that I could say is that I’m still learning myself is write because it’s what you do and what you love to do and not as much comparing yourself to other people’s writing. It’s very hard, it’s really hard. I mean, I am still guilty of it, and sometimes it’ll even stop me from creating something new, and that’s so not good. Because if you’re a creative person, you know you need to have that outlet. It feels like it my air and I need it to function. And sometimes I get so caught up in, mine doesn’t look like X, mine’s not as good as this person, and I think when I do that and I get caught up in the insecurities of that, it’s hard for me not to, it just sucks your creative energy away and you don’t get work done at all. So you don’t have anything at all to compare to anybody. But it shouldn’t be that way anyway. But it shouldn’t be that way anyway. It should be something you do. And that goes back to what I said earlier – I do it for myself. I do because I need to do it, and I’ve always done it. And I feel that gap, something missing, and I quickly try to get back on the writing wagon.

It’s hard, it’s hard. It’s hard in my environment that I’m in. It’s hard when you see somebody and it’s brilliant and you’re like “Oh my God, I could never write like that.” But I don’t write like that. I write like I write. But I think it’s human nature sometimes to do that. We just see somebody else – and in some ways it might be good because it pushes you to excel. And this is going to be a cheesy analogy, but I always think of the Beatles. If I was in the Beatles, and I was with John Lennon and Paul McCartney, I think about those two, I would have loved to sit down in a room and write with them together (can only do one now), but just working with those brilliant minds. How hard would be to be George Harrison or Ringo. And that’s who you’re working with – these brilliant people. I mean they are all great musicians, but … So, I don’t know you just got to do your own thing. Know that that’s your style, and that’s what you have, and it’s not going to be like somebody else’s especially in those workshops.

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*the conversation petered out of the “interview” type conversation here*

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RT&AW: Thank you very much.