Michael J Seidlinger is my fellow intern at Melville House, and the author of My Pet Serial Killer, The Sky Conducting, In Great Company, The Day We Delay, and a limited edition collection of experimental musings called The Artist in Question. My friend Gro Janarv asked the questions. She is a graphic designer, typographer and an aspiring writer. *** THE PUBLISHING WORLD You're doing an internship at the publishing house Melville house in New York. What do you think of the publishing world in New York? What will happen in the future? â Itâs an interesting time for NY publishing. The Big Five â the five biggest publishing housesâcontinue to absorb smaller presses as they streamline their business model. Now more than ever, a lot of literary agents are failing to sell literary fiction to the bigger houses simply because their business models are being skewed to prefer the bestsellers, the tie-ins, the quick-sells. The industry is in a grave state of change and as a result we are seeing a shifting and leveling-out of the publishing power. A lot of independent presses like Melville House, Akashic Books, Two Dollar Radio, and SoHo Press are taking on the burden of putting out work that is unjustly ignored by the bigger presses. Smaller presses like Future Tense, Lazy Fascist, and my own small press, Civil Coping Mechanisms, are placed in a prime position for creating a recognizable brand to help publish the neglected work. Itâs a time of both excitement and worry because the past tradition of major New York presses is changing and cannot be sustainable any longer; however, indie/small press suddenly have the opportunity to take advantage and work to put out the quality work that the big presses shun only because it wonât sell enough to pay for their printing/promotion costs. â In the future, we will see the Big Five become, maybe, the Big Four, while indie publishing houses will expand enough to be viable platforms for new fiction. We will see the publishing industry turn into more of a mixture of independent brands overshadowed by the power of the big press conglomerates. READING SESSIONS We met last week at a rooftop reading session with New York-based writers that you organized, can you tell us a little bit about those sessions? How did that idea come up? And, what's that reading session culture like in New York? â It kind of just came about one day when I spoke with a writer friend in the city and mentioned how I had a decent rooftop for events. I posted a Facebook event for the âRooftop Reading Seriesâ and the rest just fell into place. Writers contacted me, desiring to read; others offered to bring food, drink, even a grill. The first rooftop reading drew in about 20 people and it was extremely relaxing. Many of the participants of the first reading spoke to others about how well it turned out and quickly I felt it was necessary to host another, the one you attended. That one was a big success, drawing in about 50 people. â The rooftop readings were successful because it is so unlike other readings. Most readings are formal, and have a definite structure. With the rooftop reading series, I wanted to make it as casual and laid back as possible. As someone thatâs been to so many readings, Iâm kind of tired of the long introductions, the even longer readings by authors (sometimes they end up being up to 20 minutes long). Iâm burnt out by the endless readings around NYC. If anything, that became my motivation to start the rooftop series. Although the third one was cancelled due to a rainstorm, the demand for another has spurred my interest in rescheduling it for one of the last weekends before I leave the city. WRITING Do you daydream about the future of your writing? â Not really â I mostly preoccupy myself with the various ideas that become scenes and chapters in a novel; I spend a lot of time brainstorming ideas for novels. I carry around a notepad at all times and often jot down phrases and concepts whenever they come to me. I try to spend a couple hours every day either reading or watching a film to help stimulate my creativity enough to continue the flow of ideas. I feel like itâs important to constantly play around with plot devices and writing constraints so that you never get bored with writing. What are your thoughts on the statements "writing is the easiest thing I know, therefore I write" versus "writing is the hardest thing I know, therefore I write". â A lot of these mottos point at the same concept: Why write? Almost everyone questions the very act of writing because it is such an exhaustive and mentally draining process. Most writers spend large portions of their lives alone with their work, writing, revising, and writing some more. At some point both the writer and the outsider looking in becomes curious. Writing isnât easy for anyone. I feel that there is a drive to write â to chronicle, to catalog, to create â and those with a strong enough drive end up giving the daunting novel a shot. Thereâs a lot of failure to fight through before anyone ever finds anything worth writing⊠but, at least for me, the fight is as important as the discovery. I wake up every morning consciously aware of what sort of challenges await me when lifeâs preoccupations are completed and Iâm left with nothing but the novel, the writing, to tackle. I cannot sleep until I meet my daily quota of 1500 words. I canât live without a novel in the works. Mottos like âWriting is the easiest thing I know, therefore I writeâ exist to create some sort of context for this all-consuming drive that writers quickly adopt once they make a discovery, find something they want to write about and subsequently create goals for themselves. It is not an easy life but then again, if life were easy would it really be a life worth living? Would you consider that life? What do you want write about? What kind of stories and in what form? â I always start with a specific premise before anything else. I focus on longer work â at least 20,000 words â but before I even begin, I always know what itâll be about. I get ideas from pretty much anywhere. Most of the time I generate concepts from watching films and reading extensively. It is only when I am completely in my own head, thinking about topics, themes, and various ideas, that I, in turn, find something that might become an idea of my own. It sometimes takes a while to get there, but what I end up wanting to write about is something that crosses the line between real and surreal, possible and improbable. I like to write about what is typically uncomfortable and yet frequently interesting â be it identity, crime/deviant behavior, or heartache. READING Name three books or writers you would like to recommend for this summer? â These are often the toughest questions to answer. Hmm. I recommend any of Etgar Keretâs collections (The Nimrod Flipout, The Girl on the Fridge, The Bus Driver Who Wanted to Be God, and Suddenly A Knock on the Door), which manage to pack what might be normally explored in a 200-page novel into a 2-page short story. Etgar Keret is a master of the short story; his work never ceases to be clever and ingenious. Iâll never forget that one story, âKnellerâs Happy Campers,â and how in the story, there is a life after death for those that kill themselves where everything is gloomier, you canât smile, and people wear their method of suicide on their sleeve. â Jason, a cult graphic novel favorite, recently put out his latest title, Lost Cat. All of his characters are anthropomorphic depictions of detectives, worker bees, and other commonplace fictional characters. In Lost Cat, a detective finds a missing cat and subsequently meets the owner, a female with similar taste as him. Before he can become anything more than enamored with her, she disappears and he is forced to investigate her disappearance. â Scott McClanahan hangs around the same indie lit community as I do and has gained quite a following in the last couple years. His live readings border on performance and his fiction reads like an oral-history of everything Scottâs ever experienced. Fact or fiction, his stories are always incredibly raw and honest; his most recent book, Crapalachia, is my personal favorite. In the book, he delves into his childhood, his roots (family, town), and how all the stories and myths that we tell family members tend to become a very personal brand of lore. http://michaeljseidlinger.com http://grojanarv.se
