Last night at Two Page Tuesday, we had the largest crowd yet at
one of the readings (or, to be honest, any of the related events that have been
running since January). We had around 20 at the first reading, about 15 at the
second, 25 or so at the third, and last night, according to Megan’s count, we
had somewhere in the are of 35 to 40 fucking people there, which is
insane. All seven of the readers were
excellent, and pretty much all of the new (to the party) readers brought
friends. Somehow a creative writing club at one of the colleges caught wind of
it and decided to come. We had at least three people in attendance with ties to
either gallery/arts spaces or arts/book events there, you know, for
networking. A lot of people seemed to meet a lot of people. I’d had an
unusual kind of day and was aggressively
squirrel brained, but even still (or perhaps because of this) I’m pretty sure I
shook everyone’s hand in the room and collected emails and future readers. The
bar was happy with us, too, and have invited us back again for January. By
pretty much all (nonexistent) metrics, it was a wild success. I’m still buzzing.
The growth is good, I think, but not because it’s "growth" but because people
want to be there and seem to be getting something from it. I don’t know how many
times I told the "origin story," i.e., explained that it was a bar night that
turned into a bi-monthly reading which is now aspirationally monthly.
But it’s been slow to build. Intentionally.
I’m thinking about this today while I scribble these notes (let’s say) on my
lunch break at work, where the imperative — for good or no — is more or less
always to grow, more or less as fast as we can. And I’m
thinking about this in terms of reach and purpose and everything else, about how
there’s no point in trying to grow a community if there aren’t community ties,
how there’s no point in adding people if the people don’t actually get to know
each other, if the people being added don’t meet folks or have the kind of
experience that makes them go, "Well fuck, I guess all these people are writing
or working on novels or whatever, maybe I ought to do some of that,
too."
And part of it is functional and/or selfish, sure: I can only do so much, and
scale requires resources of time if not many other things, and I have only so
much time. So scaling slowly means I have the time to build the infrastructure I
need for it to stay fun and not a pain in the ass, like what more or less
happened with Response. And as was
pointed out by one of the writers I was talking to earlier today who had
generously offered help, "delegation takes brain batteries," and there’s no
point in delegating if I don’t have the energy to. So slow is good. I think of
what a Navy vet I worked with about a decade ago used to say: "Slow is smooth
and smooth is fast." I think about this phrase often — like, a lot.
So we grow slow. But we do grow. And I love that it’s not linear, or even
always growing larger. And I love that folks took time out of their busy lives
to come and read and/or listen and have a good time, and I love that my hunch
that many would stay for karaoke afterwards panned out, and I love that when I
say "we" about it I really do mean a "we," that though the organization of it
is still more or less a one-person operation, there is a "we": there are
regulars. People to point to. People who help.
It’s a beautiful thing. And I’m already looking forward to the next one on
December 3.
It’s next week, Nov 12! At Charlie’s! From the website:
We are SO EXCITED to announce that the 4th edition of Two Page Tuesday marks our
first “odd month” event, as well as the first (of hopefully many, many)
journey(s) across the river into Cambridge, and what better place to land than
CHARLIE’S KITCHEN. Better yet, an hour or so after our reading, we shall hearken
back to days of yore (ask someone about the c.2017-era Breakwater Reading
Series) and join in song for KARAOKE at CHARLIE’S, which a few of us were able
to confirm is an excellent thing to do after a gathering in September. It’s
seriously going to be, so, so fun.
Come along if you’re around!
Because I cannot help myself, I write a "General Prologue" for each
Two Page Tuesday. I’d be lying if it were not in
part a way for myself to read also, since I’m not going to do a two-page reading
(I’m the organizer: I want to hear other people read), but I conceived of it
mainly as a scene-setting device, as a way to establish a tone and a mood and a
clean way to transition from the bullshitting into the reading (before we, of
course, go back to the bullshitting). There have been three readings so far and
therefore there have been three "prologues," and in this last I began by talking
about how on
this podcast
the hosts were discussing where it’s best to get poems and stories and things
published, if and how that should be a goal. For the purposes of the "prologue"
I then took it over to communities and in-person things and why the reading was
so great, etc., etc., but I’ve been thinking about it mostly in other ways, at
least as far as myself is concerned.
I tend to dislike sending stories out. In fact, I really haven’t done very much
of that at all since grad school. Partly it was the pandemic, partly it was
working on a novel, but largely it was because I just don’t like the waiting.
I’ve worked for/on enough journals to know that it’s a deeply weird and
haphazard thing. Yes, good work does rise to the top eventually. But also a lot
of stories get passed on because the reader, often a grad student, is hungover
and needs a snack and has to power through 200 submissions by the end of the day
and thinks that what they’re working on right now is better than anything they
could possible read here, so why send anything along through?
(Am I bitter? Maybe. But also this is not an inaccurate picture. I have been
this grad student. This is also part of the reason I no longer work on literary
journals.)
There was a period at the beginning of this calendar year when I was sending
stories lots of places. These were "short shorts," around or under 1,000 words.
They’re kind of too long for the "flash fiction" people, and a little too short
for the "fiction" people (and so I tell myself that that’s part of why it’s so
hard for me to get them published). But I was sending them. I’d finished a good
draft of a novel and needed something different to do. Eight months later I’ve
collected a good number of form rejections, a couple personalized rejections,
and six or seven still outstanding. I’m debating sending out again, but we’ll
just have to see: I’m also querying agents about the novel, and I don’t know how
much further waiting and rejection I want to carry. (I’ll probably send, maybe
after looking over the stories again; I’m OK at compartmentalizing the waiting.)
But what I’ve been thinking about, mostly, is time. How long it takes to hear
back, and how long it takes to get the thing published, and then how long it
takes for the next one. I’ve had new friends ask to see work, or if I would mind
if they went and read some of the published stories, but I always say that
they’re so old, they’re not really representative, but then, even if I were to
get one of the stories I’d sent earlier this year published, those would not be
representative now, either.
This is partly because I’m still not really "settled," I guess, artistically.
But also I don’t think anyone ever really is, and also I suppose I’m more
settled now than I have ever been. Still.
I met a guy at a wedding who’s also a writer and with whom I was commiserating
about how hard it is to get a novel published. He’s got an agent, but is in the
no-man’s land that is what’s called being "on submission." It was good to talk
to someone about it. But he later sent me a link to a recently published story,
and again the caveat was something to the effect of it not really being
"current." The journal in question had a little drama and he’d sent it in before
any of the drama even began, how long ago. It’s all a lot of weird delay.
Of course, I completely understand why things are the way they are. There are
too many fucking writers. Too many fucking submissions, too many fucking micro
online "magazines" that nobody reads, too few fucking dollars to support any of
this. I think the only people making money on literary concerns are the people
who own Submittable. And there has
never been money in literary journals. That’s not the point. But they also
used to be run by the generationally-wealthy. The circles were smaller. This
wasn’t necessarily a good thing. But it was different.
That’s largely the reason why, when I was running
Response, the model was one
of solicitation vs submission — I had (and still have) absolutely no interest
in reading through a slush pile. It’s almost inhumane, the waiting. And journals
are even now catching up to the literary agents in terms of there now being a
"Closed No Response" option: "Unfortunately, due to the volume of materials we
receive, we may not be able to respond to every submission or query." I mean:
rude.
All of which is to say that I feel good about running a reading series instead
of a literary journal (even though I genuinely love producing literary
journals), and I feel bad about the state of literary publishing. This is not,
of course, a new or particularly unique take. But a long time ago, the writer
who was then serving as the department head of my MFA program railed during
workshop one day about how young writers — fiction writers especially — try to
publish too soon (never mind that many of us were in or approaching our thirties
or were even older than that). As with many of the things this writer said that
infuriated me back then, I’m a little less enraged now. I can almost see his
point. I mean, I still disagree. But this is a world in which you might get
something published a year, two, three years after you finished your edits and
rewrites and revisions and proofreads, and will it then still be something
you’re proud of? Maybe, maybe not.
But also I guess you’ve still go to fucking try, don’t you? If you want to do
the "writer" thing, I think, you really do.
It was last night, it was a success.
I didn’t do a final count but I know for a fact it was the largest crowd at a
Two Page Tuesday we’ve had so far. We accidentally
had a whole eight readers because I lost count of how many people I invited.
This was actually really fine, and really, really good. The readings were
lovely. There was plenty of bullshitting and fun and revelry before and after.
Many French fries were consumed. Folks talked about writing and books and not
books. There were new faces, and I got some new emails for the email list. I
asked folks to take photos and send them to me and they did, so I have some
photos to play with for future things as well.
A part of me is tempted to try and get one going in Cambridge (or anyway
somewhere north of the river) in November. But we’ll see. The Banshee was happy
to have us, seemed like.
I’ll get some work going on organizing the next one(s) tomorrow.
For today I’m content to bask in the glow of a very good time, and enjoy the
lazy, somewhat absent-minded feeling that comes after a very good night out.
I’ve been thinking about being on the internet and not on the internet lately.
I have been spending a lot of time on my computer working up a
number of
different
computer projects, but also I think I’ve
more or less given up on Bluesky as a place I’m really interested in (it’s not
as varied as Twitter was, or at least: I haven’t put in the work to make the
feed interesting), and I finally killed my Twitter (I refuse the new name)
account because… well, probably I should have parked on the username, but I also
just hate that there was an account there.
I’ve also been spending a lot of time not on the computer, in fact, out in the
world. I’m making progress on becoming best friends with the new owners of a
local bar I like a lot (see me at karaoke inconsistently on Tuesdays). I went to
a mother fucking backyard poetry reading for the first time in years, and it
was so, so, so goddamn good, the reading, and also nourishing, the event.
There have been bar nights and I’m pretty pleased with how
Two Page Tuesday is going.
I wish I could remember what I was reading specifically — although the phrase
is everywhere — but I came across (again, for the nth time) the phrase "a
certain kind of very online person", and I wondered about this. I often wonder
about this, this online-ness. I think I’m so interested in it because a lot of
the kids I thought "very cool" in high school — with whom I was friends, but in
a kind of distant way — were proto-very-online, by which I mean, they were kind
of in the shit before the shit was shit, you know? Proper fucking hipsters,
riding the beginning of the wave. I’m not saying that they were happier or in
fact cooler for it — a few of them did go on to do kind of cool shit — but I
admired it, or at least was interested in it.
(As an aside: it’s funny how these things tend to linger.)
And so I’m here sitting in a WeWork for the free WiFi and coffee (I am off work
today) looking at the website of the poet I saw headlining the backyard reading,
and at some poets around him, following links, and I’m thinking this guy might
be pretty good at being online. And not in a always on social media or anything
way, but in a "good at presenting the interesting things they’re doing on the
internet" kind of way. And so we have a distinction, or at least maybe the
beginnings of one: online in a way that online is a tool to do and talk about
art, not online as a means of… I don’t know. I want to say something snarky
about vanity or selling our eyeballs to advertisers, but that’s not quite right.
But there seems to be a certain species of "online" that I don’t mind — more a
Web 1.0 type cornering where you go to a place to find a thing and maybe you go
back and check that thing later, or — here, go read this article about
"The
Revenge of the Homepage".
I have, at times, aspired to be "hip." Have a fun, interesting online presence
or whatever. I’ve done the Instagram thing — I did pretty well when I was on my
pretending-it’s-not-a-finding-myself-trip — and I enjoyed Twitter when it was.
I’ve had more and less good websites. But now?
I’m not really trying to find a job. I have more or less given up trying to
publish short stories (maybe I just suck at them: this might be true and is
fine) and so don’t really need to have a site dedicated to shouting when they
get published. I’m trying to publish a novel but if that happens I’ll have
plenty of time to do whatever needs to be done for that after the things are
signed. So we just have this here blog that I infrequently write on. It doesn’t
really have a purpose right now. This is OK. I like having something on the
Internet, some kind of "online" for when I want to play on it. It is, even if
I’m not really in a publishing phase or a job-hunting phase, good to have a
result I control when someone googles my name. But still: it’s all just
bullshit, anyway.
I wish I had come to more of a point, but — :shrug: I always start these
thinking I’ll come to a point but I do not, but that’s why I write things for
here and not a magazine or something. I mean, I can do that kind of writing.
And I have — and have plans to again — written things for here that are more
essay-like and coherent. But this isn’t that. And that’s just fine.