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.

~*~

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.

~*~

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.

~*~

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.

~*~

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.

~*~

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.

~*~

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.

~*~

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.

~*~

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.

~*~

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.

~*~

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.

~*~

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.

~*~

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?

~*~

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. 

~*~

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.

~*~

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.

~*~

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.

~*~

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.

~*~

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

~*~

RT&AW: Thank you very much.

Who wrote that?

Who wrote that? It's the first question, after the title and subject matter of a book that we typically ask. Before we will accept a recommendation from a friend, teacher, family member, or stranger we like to know three things about a book. What is it called, what is it about, and who wrote it? It makes sense. After all, reading a book is a huge investment of time. With so many books floating around out there, of course we want to make sure we aren't wasting our time reading something uninteresting or subpar n quality.

So the question itself is valid. (Besides, we have to find the recommended book. The simplest way to do that is with author name and book title.) What I think is perhaps a little bit less valid are the things we say immediately after we hear the author's name. "Oh, I haven't heard of them." "What else did they write?" We immediately try to situate an author within the context of the other books they have written, the things we have heard about them, the back cover blurbs we've seen. We try to put a literal and figurative face to a name. Then we decide if the book might be worth our time. It is a lot harder to convince somebody to read a book by an unknown or new-to-them author than a book from one of their old standbys. I understand this. If you know an author is good and you know that you will enjoy their work, you will simply be more predisposed to reading their material.

But the material you read is tainted. It is tainted by your own associations of the author's subject matter, style of writing, common themes, the personal history he or she brings to the writing, and so many other things. This gets into author function and how we ought to read books.

Does author intent matter when one is reading and interpreting a book? I think that author intent is interesting to know, but not the end all, be all in book interpretation. No one text has just one meaning. Even if the author wrote the piece with one message in mind, the reader may glean from it something entirely different. This was certainly the case for Laura Bohannan, author of Shakespeare in the Bush. Bohannan visited the Tiv in Africa to do some ethnographic work. While there, she ended up recounting the play Hamlet by William Shakespeare. Everything she thought she knew about the text--Hamlet's insanity, King Claudius' awful deeds, Ophelia's suicide, the function of the ghost--was flipped as she told the Tiv elders the story. Because of their backgrounds and beliefs, Hamlet (with the same plot points and characters) became an entirely different story. I don't think that the Tiv's unique interpretation of Hamlet made the story any less for them though. They still connected to the story and so Shakespeare still did his job as an author.

In reading, it is reader takeaway that I believe is most important. If the reader gets something completely different from the author out of a text, it does not invalidate the reader's experience. If they connected to the text, the author can still feel accomplished in crafting a relatable, resonating story.

So how is meaning derived in a text? We talked in class about how, in today's literary culture, it is understood that the author is only a part of the whole meaning to be had from a text. I agree. I think we limit what a text is when we try to say that there is a finite number of interpretations that can be made. I'm not advocating for a world of literature where somebody can read The Three Musketeers and say it is really about alligators, and how alligators hate that they are always confused with crocodiles. I am saying that we can look at context from a perspective that is historical, current, political, social and so on for each interpreter. If the text and interpretation within a context match up, then it is valid. Perhaps, instead of discussing the author's context and speculating about an intent the author themselves may not even know, all literary criticism should come with a footnote delineating the critic's context. This is what allows for the constant reinterpretation of texts.

Where to go now...

        After finishing The Book I have an entirely new respect for the object that is a book and how it came to be what it is today. I had always assumed that the Gutenberg press was the first method for producing printed books, when in reality it was just the first big innovation for efficient printing. I imagined a series of upgrades to the system that streamlined the process without really changing it. After hundreds of years, somebody invented the computer and printing and all books were produced digitally from then on.

This couldn’t be farther from the truth. There were numerous innovations made that completely changed the look and function of printing presses time and time again. Even today, with digital printing a viable and cheap option, many publisher’s still rely on offset printing because of the greater quality prints that can be produced.

All of the innovations were directed by market forces. In the 19th and 20th centuries, books were becoming affordable commodities and reading had turned into a popular leisure activity as well as a necessity for scholarly pursuit. It was necessary, then, to develop methods to facilitate a faster turnover--to meet demand for daily news and much-desired popular books--and sell, sell, sell. 

One of the most interesting points of The Book was the discussion in the last chapter about the future of books. Will they continue to sell? In what format will they continue to sell? How will the industry change as books change? These are hotly contested debates in the literary world right now. Change is a scary thing. Change means the status quo will be thrown out in favor of something previously unknown.

Just like compositors, press men, paper makers, engravers and other old print-related professions that have gone by the wayside, printing professionals are worried about their jobs. This is understandable. Jobs will disappear, I believe. Such is the nature of technology. In a world run by corporations that place the greatest value on biggest bang for the book, automation is where the future is.

I think that books will also change. Of course there will always be a few people who collect and read traditional print books (just as there are those music fans who insist on listening to vinyl records), but this niche market will dwindle as advancements in book technology grow and spread in availability. Right now the new innovation in book technology is e-books. I don’t think that this is the final stage of progress though--for example, music technology has moved from records to tapes to 8-tracks to CDs to mp3s. Just as it would have been impossible for record users to predict the existence of mp3s, it is impossible for us to predict what books of the future will be like (though it can be fun to speculate). We will always have books, of that I am sure. Books have such a pervasive power and draw that they will remain popular for at least some part of population.

I think that the best way to handle all of this change is simply to embrace it. Yes, the book industry will change. But, by embracing the changes and upcoming innovations, we can use them to our benefit rather than our detriment. Those interested in getting into the book business can look to jobs such as content moderators, page designers, graphic designers, coding, marketing, editing, and more. By embracing the changes instead of balking in the face of them we can get ahead of the industry and ensure that books continue to be widely available, heartily encouraged time investments.