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Writing Times with Frances Kai-Hwa Wang

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Pact Press author Frances Kai-Hwa Wang

Most writers have day jobs and frequently have difficulty finding writing time. How do you manage it?

I have four children and nine jobs. I manage it by not sleeping. Ever.

How long have you been writing and do you perceive your writing to have evolved in any particular way that you would like to share?

I have been writing since fifth grade when I wrote a book review of “Old Bones” for Highlights Magazine. I did it for the money, $5. Since then, I have written news, feature articles, reviews, essays, columns, blog posts, prose poetry, and creative nonfiction, primarily for ethnic new media. I have also created multimedia artworks and I have hand sewn chapbooks. I speak often to college students and young professionals about Asian American history and media, challenging them to resistance and action. Regardless of the form, I find that I am always searching for meaning, for truth, for better understanding. My guardian angel once observed, “You’re the sort of person who doesn’t even know what you think until you’ve written it.”

What appealed to you about being a part of the Pact Press Speak and Speak Again anthology?

I love the Southern Poverty Law Center, Teaching Tolerance, and all the great work that they do!

What do you think is the responsibility of the writer in today’s polarized environment?

Make trouble. Move hearts. Incite people to action. #GoodTrouble

 Why do you do write? Why do you do what you do?

I really want to help empower younger Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders so that they do not have to go through the same stuff we did with identity crises, being a minority, always being “the only one.” I would love to spare people (starting with my own children) the angst of wrestling with who they are, what they are, how they fit in, and help them develop a strong sense of identity, culture, and pride. I advocate and speak up for the older generation and more recent immigrants who might not have the education, political awareness, or English skills to fight for their rights and their children’s rights. I talk to the mainstream because I figure that the best way to protect my children from racism and discrimination tomorrow is to educate their peers today.

 

Frances Kai-Hwa Wang is a second-generation Chinese American from California who now divides her time between Michigan and Hawai‘i. She is a contributor and essayist for NBC News Asian America. She has also written for AAPIVoices.com, NewAmericaMedia.org, ChicagoIsTheWorld.org, AnnArbor.com, PacificCitizen.org, InCultureParent.com. She teaches Asian/Pacific Islander American Studies at University of Michigan. She has published three chapbooks of prose poetry, been included in several anthologies and art exhibitions, and created a collaborative multimedia artwork for a Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center.

Frances has three chapbooks available from Blacklava Books

Imaginary Affairs—Postcards from an Imagined Life

Where the Lava Meets the Sea–Asian Pacific American Postcards from Hawai‘i

Dreams of the Diaspora

Connect with Frances:

 Website

TWITTER

FACEBOOK

Writing Times with Daniel A. Olivas

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Daniel A. Olivas, Pact Press author
Daniel A. Olivas lives in Los Angeles with his wife. By day, he is an attorney.

Pact Press sits down with Daniel A. Olivas, who offers thoughtful insight on the writing craft and on the duty of writers in a polarized age, with a inspiring message for emerging writers. Pact Press is very proud to be releasing Daniel A. Olivas’ poetry collection, Crossing the Border, in the fall of this year.

  • Most writers have day jobs and frequently have difficulty finding writing time. How do you manage it?

First, I have a very patient spouse who understands my artistic compulsion to write.  Second, I am a compulsive writer.  Third, I derive great joy from creative writing.

  • How long have you been writing and do you perceive your writing to have evolved in any particular way that you would like to share?

I’ve been writing since I learned how to spell out words.  My mother saved some of my very early little books that I wrote…simple stories with illustrations.  I wrote all through school but put aside creative writing when I went to law school and started my legal career.  But even as a lawyer, I wrote constantly: briefs, memos, letters.  I also wrote articles for our legal newspaper here in Los Angeles.  Then at the ripe old age of 39, I started to write fiction and poetry which started to get published.  Now, 19 years later and almost a dozen books to my name along with critical and scholarly recognition of my writing, I’m still in love with the creative process.  In terms of my evolution as a writer, I believe that my stories and poetry are deeper yet more economical.

  • What appealed to you about being a part of the Pact Press Speak and Speak Again anthology?

With the election of Trump, we’ve entered into a very dangerous time in our history.  I feel as though I have a duty to be part of the literary resistance movement.  I will not sit back quietly.  I believe Speak and Speak Again is part of that movement.

  • What do you think is the responsibility of the writer in today’s polarized environment?

As a writer of color, as a Chicano writer, I feel as though I have a duty to speak out in favor of diversity, civil rights, and justice especially during these perilous political times.  Also, I believe that when a person of color gets published, that—by itself—is a political act.  As I often tell students when I get a chance to speak in front of them: if we don’t write our own stories, someone else will, and they will get it wrong.

  • What advice would you offer writers who are just embarking on their careers?

Work hard, read a lot, and don’t let anyone tell you that your voice is not important.

Connect with Daniel:
 TWITTER
 WEBSITE
Daniel’s published work may be ordered through your local bookstore, online, or through the publishers:

The King of Lighting Fixtures: Stories (University of Arizona Press, 2017)

Crossing the Border: Collected Poems (Pact Press, 2017)

The Coiled Serpent: Poets Arising from the Cultural Quakes and Shifts of Los Angeles (Tía Chucha Press, 2016)

Things We Do Not Talk About: Exploring Latino/a Literature through Essays and Interviews (San Diego State University Press, 2014)

The Book of Want: A Novel (University of Arizona Press, 2011)

Anywhere But L.A.: Stories (Bilingual Press, 2009)

Latinos in Lotusland (Bilingual Press, 2008)

Benjamin and the Word (Arte Público Press, 2005)

Devil Talk: Stories (Bilingual Press, 2004)

Assumption and Other Stories (Bilingual Press, 2003)

A note from our senior editor

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Books on the stairsRegal is a marvelous House, founded as it is on Jaynie’s passion for involving literature and her devotion to the authors who write it. When Jaynie asked me to help her lay bricks as the Senior Editor, I was—and still am—over the moon (don’t worry; there’s Internet here and manuscripts reach me even through the sublunary atmosphere). Jaynie and I share a desire—one that drives many independent publishers—to return to a publishing ethos in which authors are treated with courtesy and respect and their works are edited conscientiously and with great care. We meld traditional, intense, editorial engagement with the technology that enables small presses to publish noteworthy literature that might otherwise languish undiscovered and unread.

Jaynie and I also share an approach that is so simpatico, it is difficult not to believe that fate brought us together. Our perspectives are almost always in sync, and when they aren’t, they neatly complement each other. We sing either in unison or in harmony. (That’s metaphorical; it is only on occasion or accident that I can even carry a tune.)

The books we publish move and astonish; they tell stories that build their own edifices in the souls of their readers. After an author has worked extensively with Jaynie, the manuscript comes to me. With a fresh pair of eyes, I look for remaining developmental issues and do a thorough copy edit. I put together a style sheet to ensure consistency in spelling, punctuation, the expression of numbers (when to spell them out and when to use digits) and dates, conformity to U.S. or U.K. conventions, and notes on authorial preferences. I check to make sure the chapter titles and the pages given in the Table of Contents match the chapters in the book and that footnotes are sequential. I correct grammar, punctuation, spelling, syntax, spacing, and usage, and make suggestions for diction, awkwardness, jargon, wordiness, paragraphing, and terms that should be defined. I note permissions that are needed, facts that should be verified, and gaps in organization or logic. I believe in the importance of a balanced edit—let’s face it, page after page of corrections can get pretty disheartening—so I also point out what makes the manuscript excel: luminous passages, apt word choices, insightful characterization, intriguing plot points, and evocative imagery.

All this happens in two stages, or “passes.” The first pass I do the old-fashioned way, on paper, pencil in hand. The second pass is done in Microsoft Word using Track Changes. As I incorporate the manual edits into the computer file, I look for errors and felicities I missed during the first read-through. For me, the combination of approaches enables a more thorough edit, one that uses different parts of my brain.

Once the author, Jaynie, and I agree that revisions are complete and Jaynie has formatted the text, I perform a final proofreading to catch the errors that inevitably creep in during re-writes and formatting. Our rigorous editing process is a vital facet of what makes Regal a stand-out publishing house.

Another tool in my editing kit is my scholarly background. I am an independent scholar of Medieval and Early Modern literature. I came of academic age at the end of the New Critical movement and was steeped in the importance of a close reading, a habit of mind I bring to bear as I edit. My own historical inquiries allow me to appreciate the time and effort required to piece together research-rich novels that give new life to past events and cultures while making space in that milieu for the characters and events created in the mind of an author.

An independent contractor, I usually work at home but am known to lurk in coffee houses for a change of scenery. Although I’m not much of an imbiber, one of my favorite editing haunts has become Conor O’Neil’s—sort of Boulder’s version of Cheers. Conor’s serves an out-of-this-world Irish Soda Bread Pudding with absolutely decadent vanilla ice cream lightly sprinkled with cinnamon (and the pudding has eggs in it and the ice cream has calcium, so they count as health food). I am sure that I edit both more accurately and more kindly while consuming this dish. However, tragedy struck when the pub recently closed when its landlord imposed a heavy rent increase. I was distraught. Fortunately, a significant portion of the community shared my distress. A petition and letter-writing campaign succeeded in bringing about a compromise that allowed the pub to re-open. Now I can continue to have my edits sweetened by the congenial atmosphere and my favorite dessert. Huzzah for the power of words to rectify what would have been a sad loss to the community and sent me on a search for a new place to lurk.

The power of words and of language to create new concepts, to persuade us to re-engage with familiar ideas, to forge new worlds and even new civilizations (yes, I am also a sci-fi geek) informs my commitment to supporting authors as they bring forth new works. I couldn’t be more proud of my association with Regal and with Jaynie, nor more pleased to have found a publishing house that shares my faith in the need for literature that opens our minds and broadens our souls.

Ruth Feiertag

Dickens and Regal House Publishing

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Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens

While reading a biography of Charles Dickens, I came across this marvelous excerpt from a letter the author sent to his friend Forster describing the dispute with his publisher, Bentley. Specifically, Dickens was reluctant to undertake the writing of Barnaby Rudge due to being greatly depressed by the contractually fixed disproportion between his publisher’s earnings from his books and his own. In a letter of early 1839, he wrote the following:

“The immense profits which Oliver Twist has realised to its publisher, and is still realising; the paltry, wretched, miserable sum it has brought to me (not equal to what is every day paid for a novel that sells fifteen hundred copies at most); the recollection of this, and the consciousness that I have still the slavery and drudgery of another work on the same journeyman-terms; the consciousness that my books are enriching everybody concerned with them but myself, and that I, with such a popularity as I have acquired, am struggling in old toils, and wasting my energies in the very height and freshness of my fame, and the best part of my life, to fill the pockets of others, while for those who are nearest and dearest to me I can realise little more than a genteel subsistence: all this puts me out of heart and spirits…” Of course, the publishing world was an entirely different animal in the early nineteenth century; the proliferation of e-reading apparatus, the ready freedom to self-publish, the global readership to which writers currently market themselves – these would certainly have astonished Dickens if he was granted a glimpse of the publishing world today.

But I wonder whether the financial inequity in regards to royalty revenue (the slimmest of pie-slices that return to the author of the creative work) I wonder whether that would, to Dickens, remain recognizable. When one takes into account the wholesale discount, the cost of printing and distribution, the publisher’s slice, as well as that of the literary agent (assuming one goes the traditional route)…the writer is left with a rather piddling portion from the sale of their own literary work.

Regal House Publishing is, of course, subject to these costs as are other publishing houses. We must pay our copyeditors, our acquisition agents, our cover artists, our website designers. We must pay for printing, marketing, and advertising. Like any other business we must maintain a healthy accounting ledger, but our priority remains, now and as long as we are in business, with the writer. We are seeking writers of literary fiction – historical or contemporary – and it is for these individuals, these scribes of our age, that we maintain a profound respect. A respect that is manifested in maximizing the proceeds that accrue to them as a result of their long and dedicated endeavor. Throwing open the publishing doors, so to speak, and accepting submissions directly from writers is our way of achieving this. The Regal House Team supports and empowers our writers by encouraging and enabling a transparency to the publishing process, and involving them closely in the decision-making process.

A new way of doing business that has, perhaps, short-changed the writer for over one hundred and fifty years. Dickens would have loved Regal, and we, of course, would have simply adored him!