The Trade

sarah1Professional conferences. We’ve all been to them, and I’ve probably attended more than my share. When I was in graduate school and then on the job market, the Modern Language Association (MLA) conference created both excitement and dismay as we newly-minted PhDs sent out our many applications and then compared notes on our interviews. In our first positions as assistant professors, we continued to attend, hoping to make our names as scholars and writers. Soon after I got my first tenure-track job, I returned to writing poems, and the Associated Writing Programs (AWP) annual meeting quickly eclipsed MLA, where writers could hear panels on the craft and individual readings, meet editors, find books from new or small presses, and connect with other poets and fiction writers. I would go to meet other poets and to seek out editors of journals I liked, had been published in, or aspired to be in. The book fair in those days was a highlight, because, well, we were there because we loved books and writing, right?

Not always. I found, as the years went by, that these conferences became monstrously rats-trapped-cagelarge and that the presentations on offer were too many in too short a time. Too many panels, too many readings: I couldn’t see them all and often ended up frustrated and exhausted. Rats in a cage. It wasn’t the mood I wanted to return to my writing in. And the book fair, especially at AWP, was so sprawling that finding anyone or really seeing anything among the packed tables and narrow aisles was practically impossible. Like MLA, AWP seemed to devolve into just another “look and veer” meeting, at which attendees encounter others, look quickly at their nametags, then veer away rapidly if the person isn’t famous enough.

This weekend, I found myself at a new kind of conference, the New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Association meeting. I sat at the book fair table of Knox Robinson Publishing, with whom I’ve published two novels, The Altarpiece (2013) and City of Ladies (2014). My third, The King’s Sisters, comes out next August. My previous books were all poetry collections, and I had no idea how different it is to market a novel, but I had sat at tables during AWP and thought this wouldn’t be too different.

sarah2The book fair was full, to be sure, but all of the publishers could fit into one large ballroom. Even though Knox Robinson is a small independent, we were given a good spot near a couple of the big publishers, and instead of being squeezed together, we could all see—and walk—easily across to the other side of the room. The fair was only open for one Saturday, which was perfect, as it concentrated all of the energy into a short time. Our table held Dana Robinson (founder of Knox Robinson), as well as KR authors Victoria Wilcox, Michael Oates, Hilary Holladay, and me. Booksellers kept us busy, and we talked to a steady stream of store owners from the eastern seaboard. We handed out advance review copies of our books (ARCs) as well as copies of our earlier novels to anyone who was interested, and they shared with us stories of the independent bookstore business. We talked history (Knox Robinson specializes in historical fiction), business, travel, and, of course books.

It was pleasant, friendly, yes, a bit hectic for a while, but energizing. I was having a great time, but it wasn’t until the middle of the afternoon that I was struck with the reason. We were all talking frankly and openly about the reason we were there: books and the business of books. There was little posturing and less pretentiousness. It was all about the books and not about who seemed personally cool and who did not. People certainly checked each other out, and introduced themselves to people they wanted to talk to, but they did it without the charade—so obvious to anyone who’s been at these meetings—of pretending to be too important to need to ask someone’s name.

Nobody who writes, publishes, or sells books needs to be told that the industry is hierarchical, but at this conference that stratification didn’t seem to govern the social interactions at meals, panels, or the book fair. I spoke to everyone I wanted to—and met many people who tirelessly work at promoting books in their stores. Many of them received their first Knox Robinson books from us—but they remembered who we were later that day and wanted to talk more about our books. Colleagues of our distributor, Midpoint Books, came over to say hello and meet the authors of the books they help get into the market.

NAIBA was informative, exciting, and (there’s no better word) fun. We didn’t have a big dance and no one got sloppy drunk and misbehaved. We didn’t pack the hotel. What we did, however, was talk, plan, and work toward our mutual goal of getting new hardcovers and paperbacks to readers in the most sensible, mutually beneficial ways possible. And in these days of talk about the death of print and the inability of American children to concentrate, I found the conversation both stimulating and optimistic. Publishing is a business, yes, but the product is unique—the source of our ideas, fantasies, and information—and many small bookstore owners are little short of heroic in their efforts to connect authors with their customers. This weekend, I saw that the business is thriving, and readers do still exist. They’re mostly not at conferences, however, either academic or “creative.” They’re mostly at home, curled up quietly in chairs, enjoying their books.

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Sarah Kennedy is the author of the novels Self-Portrait, with Ghost and The Altarpiece, City of Ladies, and The King’s Sisters, Books in The Cross and the Crown series, set in Tudor England.  She has also published seven books of poems.  A professor of English at Mary Baldwin University in Staunton, Virginia, Kennedy holds a PhD in Renaissance Literature and an MFA in Creative Writing.  She has received grants from both the NEA, the NEH, and the VA Commission for the Arts.  Please visit Sarah at her website:  http://sarahkennedybooks.com

Witchcrap

Salem-WGN-America-s1-2014-poster-1 Historical fiction seems to have become as much a staple of contemporary television as it has contemporary reading, and many of these shows try to correct the look of previous Hollywood-prettified versions of the past with grittier sets, costumes, and dialogue.  Henry VIII certainly never looked like Jonathan Rhys Meyers (except for that one adolescent portrait), but The Tudors did try to represent the very real machinations and misbehavior in Renaissance England, even among the clergy.  Vikings has so far given us authentically tattooed and made-up men going about their aggressive business, though the writers seem to have misunderstood the role that women played in Viking culture.  Deadwood may have overdone it with the dialogue, but it broke ground for other shows by showing the American West through characters who are dirty, lustful, and regularly violent.  Hell on Wheels also unflinchingly depicted the West, focusing on the greed and corruption of American industrialists as the country expanded.  For the most part, I enjoyed these, and other series like them, primarily because they seemed more adult, more real, than what television often serves up.

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More recently, shows like Turn have taken on specific historical events, and in a Wicked or Maleficent move, have tried to show viewers another side of the received story.  Sadly, I couldn’t keep track of the turns on the show enough to stay engaged and so, though I applauded the effort, I turned off Turn after a few episodes.  Then there’s Penny Dreadful, which has a certain ghoulish appeal.  This one seems to pride itself on humanizing Frankenstein’s monster (though Mary Shelley did that, too) and demonizing its sexy Dorian Gray (but didn’t Oscar Wilde already do that, as well?).  This show, however, becomes so allusively chaotic that it’s hard not to laugh, even when Vanessa Ives puts on her most low-browed scowl.  I wonder sometimes if the writers are a bunch of English majors who get together for a party every week and throw any characters they can recall from their nineteenth-century surveys into the script.

1000323_1_0_prm-evavid_1024x640What Penny Dreadful offers, in addition to its refresher course in Victorian monster lit, is the paranormal aspect that still draws viewers (and readers).  Despite the controversy surrounding the YA author John Green, whose success has led some critics to say that the Harry Potter/Twilight phenomenon is passing in favor of a return to psychological realism, the paranormal still seems to sell.  Game of Thrones has capitalized on this, and the imagined world it creates (which looks, still, quite a lot like medieval Europe) allows for dragon-taming waifs and big baddies with super-powers alongside its more pedestrian castles and monarchs.

And now along comes SalemsalemhomeI looked forward to this show, because it seemed to feature strong female characters and a re-examination of a touchstone event in American history.  The Salem witch trials, as many students of the past know, came at the tail end of a long period of debate about demonic powers in Europe, in which thousands of people were summarily tortured, hanged, or burned.  Or all three.  Even at the beginning of the witchcraft prosecutions in medieval Europe, scholars and skeptics expressed horror at the anti-intellectualism of belief in witches and at the use of Christianity to justify the gruesome murders that witchcraft judges ordered.  The Salem trials, historically speaking, were a footnote to centuries of panic, hatred, fear—and revulsion at that very panic.  But the women and men who died there would have been little comforted by that knowledge.

In the first episode, I saw, to my own horror, that the show actually promotes the notion that the witches were real, that women stalk and creep around Salem in their gothy costumes seeking out converts and colleagues in their demonic business.  George Selby is a cretin, to be sure, but when Mary shoves a live—and rather large—toad down his throat to bewitch him, she’s become the villain.  Or has she?  The witches are attractive and seem to get away with wearing dresses that no woman in the historic Salem would have ever been allowed out of the house in.  Mary Selby carries a torch for John Alden, who glowers handsomely and yearns from afar.  Gorgeous Mary is, of course, the witch ring-leader, and when a truly abhorrent Increase Mather hits the scene, viewers will no doubt root for her.

Salem 01 01 79What bothers me about this show is that, in this version, Mather is right.  In this Salem, there are witches (along with open pits for dumping bodies to provide a nice gruesome spot for organ-munching), and these witches have real paranormal powers.  George Selby is disgusting, but pity the poor nice man who marries a witch and angers her—he’ll probably get the toad-down-the-gullet treatment, too.  And now we discover that being a witch might even be genetic, passed down from parent to child, like brown eyes or crooked teeth.

Salem-TV-Series-image-salem-tv-series-36800019-1417-1890It’s not the super-powers per se that bother me, though I confess that I regard contemporary ghosts and spooky things and super-heroes as easy, light entertainment to pass a summer afternoon when it’s too hot to weed the garden.  They’re what I watch when there’s no serious history or historical fiction on.  And they’re fine, for what they are.  What bothers me about Salem is the fact that real women and men were charged with the acts that the TV show presents as “normal,” and they were killed under those charges, either by starvation or illness in stinking, hellish jails or on the scaffold.  And there was Giles Cory, who expired under a pile of stones.

The show purports to be an analysis of “otherness,” and that’s a laudable goal.  But why use a very real, and literal, witch hunt in our history to do it?  Even as metaphor, these characters are too convoluted in their aspirations and too gruesome in their means to achieve the rank of social commentators.  For me, it has finally gotten to be too much.  Witches are not oppressed minorities, and they are not marginalized subgroups.  They’re not real.  So I’m turning off Salem, in protest against this sort of exploitative, silly pseudo-history and out of respect for the very human women and men who were killed in that sad, isolated Massachusetts town.

hanging-witch

A History of the Craft (An Introduction)
from A Witch’s Dictionary by Sarah Kennedy (Elixir Press 2008)

Salem’s a blip at the tail end (sorry
to say) of the burning times, and now we
host pagans and pirate fans, devotees

of Hawthorne.  But these days we’re exorcised—
the park’s stone benches are flanked with flowers
and visitors can sit at their leisure

right on top of the victims’ last words. You’d
never know from the black hats, capes, and brooms
displayed in the sidewalk sales that thousands

were flogged or burned or hanged across Europe.
Some say fifty thousand, a hundred.  Some say
twice or three times that.  You have surely heard

the beliefs, the crazy scholarship: all
those thick demonologies prescribing
suspicion or torture of anyone

who questioned authority.  The sure signs?—
there’s nocturnal flight, of course, on sticks
or dogs or goats, there’s attendance at feasts

and unsanctioned dances (i.e. “sabbats”).
There’s always disagreement with a church
or king or court.  So the world went, and so

it goes: racking, stripping, beating, terror-
izing.  Have you seen the reproduction
relics?  Take this little gem, for instance—

this is  Joan of Arc’s immaculate heart,
left whole beneath the smoldering remains
of her famous fire!  Did you guess?  You know

the story, you might call her an early
political prisoner (the English
soldiers didn’t really think she conjured

the devil, she just seemed a little weird,
a little touched, you know, disposable).
Let’s see: there’s the Witch of Berkeley, Witches

of Stedlingerland, of Lombardy, of
North Berwick, of Chelmsford, of Lancashire
(1612), of Lancashire one more time

(1633), of Brescia . . . oh, I
can’t keep track.  *sigh*  Does anyone here still
smoke?  Those New England jurors recanted,

but the dead are still dead and now families,
maps and ice-creams in hand, gaze, enchanted,
at the shiny windows of the judge’s

house, making scary faces at themselves.
During the “Enlightenment,” the witch turned
into a ghost.  The poltergeist “Bell Witch”

of Tennessee chatted by the family fire
with Andrew Jackson, the “Blair Witch”
is mostly a jiggly camera.  Wiccans

own many of the souvenir shops here
in Salem, you’ll know them by their flowing
robes.  I’m sure you’ll want a look.  The children

help out, though they’re skittish of strangers.  Look,
there’s one now, sweeping up receipts and trash!
It must be closing time.  You’d better run.
GH15

 

 


Sarah Kennedy is the author of the novels Self-Portrait, with Ghost and The Altarpiece, City of Ladies, and The King’s Sisters, Books in The Cross and the Crown series, set in Tudor England.  She has also published seven books of poems.  A professor of English at Mary Baldwin University in Staunton, Virginia, Kennedy holds a PhD in Renaissance Literature and an MFA in Creative Writing.  She has received grants from both the NEA, the NEH, and the VA Commission for the Arts.  Please visit Sarah at her website:  http://sarahkennedybooks.com

All Things in Heaven and Earth

fun ghostThe supernatural seems to have infected contemporary writing of all kinds.  Many readers were charmed by the notion of the kid-wizards of the Harry Potter books, and before that Anne Rice had tamed vampires to the point that they seemed almost like the funny, quirky neighbors whose house always smells a little odd.  The genres of horror and fantasy now have moved into all kinds of fiction—and even poetry—to the point that it seems impossible to find any kind of book that hasn’t tried to exploit the current obsession with the paranormal, the supernatural and the superhero, the faery-born and the dragon-wielding.  As a writer of historical fiction, I resist this trend, even as the genre in which I write seems to invite indulgence in it.  My main character in The Altarpiece (Knox Robinson Publishing 2013) is a nun in Tudor England—and if that’s not a setting for some spooky business, I don’t know what is.  But for me, that’s taking the easy way out.  My nun tries to see the world as it is and to make her way in it using her wits rather than relying on some holy superpowers.

Now, I like a good ghost story as well as the next person, and I was an avid watcher of bad vampire movies as a child.  As an adult reader, however, I tire of the intrusion into otherwise realistic character-driven novels and poems of unexplained paranormal features:  the Twilight phenomenon.  I read The Hunger Games, a story I first dismissed as a tale for kids, with some pleasure because it was science fiction rather than fantasy that tried to provide some explanation for the dystopia it created.  I’ve enjoyed episodes of Game of Thrones, but I grind my teeth whenever the dragon-keeping waif of a woman appears.

Why does this grate on me when I love reading and teaching Hamlet?  It’s partly because the culture that produced the play accepted the reality of immanent non-human beings.  Hamlet is not the only character who sees the ghost, and even the scholar Horatio knows how he is supposed to talk to one.  And yet—the ghost of Hamlet’s father is also a joke, as he’s revealed to be not only a terrifying apparition but an actor who runs around under the stage yelling “swear.”  Shakespeare’s clearly got his tongue in his cheek even as he invokes a “ghost.”

And we are laughing, sometimes.  But the students at my college get more excited—seriously excited—about steam punk and Abraham Lincoln as a vampire hunter and the so-called zombocalypse than they do about most literature.  It may be that in our meta-textual world, we slide into fantasy as comfortably as we adopt our Facebook and blog identities.  We’re all just intersections of discourses, right?

Maybe.  But the now-standard addition of supernatural elements to writing seems also to be market-driven.  We’ll pay to give up the very difficult task of living in the physical world to the easier fantasy of vampires and wizards and superheroes who make the work of real action in the real world almost irrelevant.  They either know right from wrong inherently and completely and have the power to enforce it or they blur the lines between the human (good) and paranormal (bad and scary) to the point where it doesn’t matter anymore.  Throw a cute dragonette over their shoulders or a bottle of glitter-paint over a few of them and they’re not even frightening anymore.

For writers of historical fiction, especially in settings that predate the Enlightenment, the temptation is perhaps even stronger to insert ghosts, monsters, magical cups, cauldrons, crowns, or swords.  Why not spells or incantations?  Why not a little card-reading or some magic potions?  People believed in this stuff, didn’t they?

Some of them did, to be sure, but such beliefs came under question by skeptics, even early in the Christian Church in Europe.  The witch hunts of the late middle ages were gruesome and horrifying, but even they didn’t entirely quash the arguments among thinking men and women that the witch was born of ignorance and superstition.  In England (the setting or pseudo-setting of much historical fiction and dungeons-and-dragons fantasy), talk of witchcraft and sorcery was long met with raised eyebrows.  Of course, Anne Boleyn was rumored to have engaged in witchcraft to snare Henry VIII, but this was one among many questionable charges against her when Henry was devolving into an off-with-their-heads style of leadership.  James I was a famous witch-hunter in his youth, but by the time he took the English throne, he was himself belittling unquestioning belief in demonic powers.  The hideous episode of hangings that the self-styled “Witch-Finder General” Matthew Hopkins caused in England had as much to do with the upheavals of the Civil War as it had to do with an increase in real belief in witches.

I could have made my main character, Catherine Havens, “magical” in her ability to heal.  But she’s not.  She’s an intelligent woman who observes the effects of different methods of treating disease and injury and tries to adjust her knowledge accordingly.  She prays, and she believes in God, but she doesn’t believe in magic or spells or curses—except when they reveal an ill-wishing that results in very human criminal behavior.  She does admire the mystic Margery Kempe, but what interests me about figures like Kempe and Julian of Norwich is the pain and depth of the visitations they record.

There may in fact be more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophies, but the paranormal has become like the ubiquitous puppy, kitten, or baby in the television advertisement:  it’s there because it sells.  Give me the story that does the harder work of creating a character who fails or succeeds without anything twinkling, sparkling, winged, or fanged, who faces conflict in the form in which we really find it—other people and, more often, ourselves.

sarah k http://sarahkennedybooks.wordpress.com


Sarah Kennedy is the author of the novels Self-Portrait, with Ghost and The Altarpiece, City of Ladies, and The King’s Sisters, Books in The Cross and the Crown series, set in Tudor England.  She has also published seven books of poems.  A professor of English at Mary Baldwin University in Staunton, Virginia, Kennedy holds a PhD in Renaissance Literature and an MFA in Creative Writing.  She has received grants from both the NEA, the NEH, and the VA Commission for the Arts.  Please visit Sarah at her website:  http://sarahkennedybooks.com