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BookBound: Broadway Books

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Ruth’s Bookstore Safari, Part II: Just in Time for the Party!

In Portland, I was able to hit four amazing bookstores. The first was the bijou Broadway Books. Broadway Books is a small indie store, fortuitously located on a busy and popular stretch of the street for which it’s named. (It’s also across from my favourite brunch place, the Cadillac Café, where the food is always excellent and satisfying, the staff pleasant and courteous, and the Cadillac pink and operable.)

The store-front windows of Broadway Books make the shop light and airy, and its well-organized shelves draw customers on to explore the next book, the next topic, the next table. Over the shelves hang poster-sized covers of other volumes for which readers might want to search.

One of our authors, Paula Butterfield, lives in Portland, and she gave me a heads-up that the store was going to be celebrating its twenty-fifth anniversary while I was in town, and I put the party on my calendar. However, I couldn’t help stopping by a couple times before the anniversary fête. Despite its small size, the book selection never feels inadequate. I made four trips into the store, and each time came out with a book or two, cards and postcards, or beautiful wrapping paper. The staff were invariably charming and helpful. I make particular mention of Rose, who was kind and informative both times I encountered her there.

The birthday party on Saturday made it obvious what a community asset the store is. I met a trio of women who had been friends for forty years. Regular customers milled about, chatting, talking books with the owners and staff, having their photos taken at the picture booth set up for the day, and eating cake and drinking champagne. Despite the bustle of the celebration, I saw the staff continuously assisting customers by making recommendations and finding books. One of the owners (alas! I did not discover which one) asked everyone there to please go out and tell the story of their book store, and I am happy to comply with that request here.

Do check out the website for the history of the store and a calendar of events. But the best, most moving tribute to the store can be found on its wall, in the form of a paean by Brian Doyle. It perfectly captures the magic Broadway Books holds for anyone who enters.

P.S. Very shortly after my visit to Broadway Books, Brian Doyle died of brain cancer. Broadway Books has a memorial planned for him on September 21, 2017.

Ruth Feiertag, Senior editor Regal House Publishing

Ruth Feiertag is a senior editor at Regal House Publishing. She has an M.A. from the University of Colorado at Boulder. She meandered towards a Ph.D. but arrived in the realm of independent scholarship and NCIS instead. Ruth is the founding editor of PenKnife Editorial Services, and a member of the National Coalition of Independent Scholars.

Writing Times with Steve Gutierrez

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Steve Gutierrez, Pact Press author
Pact Press sits down with Steve Gutierrez, who offers thoughtful insight on the writing craft and on the duty of writers in a polarized age. Pact Press is very proud to include Steve’s article “Our President-Elect Causes Chest Pains and an ER Visit on Thanksgiving,” in our inaugural anthology.

1. Most writers have day jobs and frequently have difficulty finding writing time. How do you manage it?
I don’t have a set schedule. I just write when I can, as often as I can—often at night when everything else is done. I have a compulsive personality that needs to get all the daily stuff that can wait out of the way before I can devote myself to writing. I manage it by creating a goal—to get something specific done that day, no matter how big or small the task.
2. 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 was eighteen but there have been long stretches, like years, when I wasn’t writing, not by choice but because of whatever was going on inside my head that made it impossible. The writing has changed in a lot of ways, from the composition of sentences, their feel and texture, to a leap into more hybrid forms. I don’t respect genre boundaries. I could care less what anybody else thinks about it.
3. What appealed to you about being a part of the Pact Press Speak and Speak Again anthology?
I was pretty upset by the election of Donald Trump, feeling a nascent evil in the air that I do not think was imaginary. He gave the green light to many hateful people and groups, at least psychologically, and that mood of vengefulness permeated the atmosphere. I do believe that our inner states manifest themselves in very real changes in the air, again—in the air came a foul odor of fear and terror. Writing against it helped dispel my feeling of powerlessness—the anthology gave me an opportunity to join with others to cleanse the air or at least add another breeze to it.
4. What do you think is the responsibility of the writer in today’s polarized environment?
It is the same as always, to write truthfully and honestly, but more urgently than ever before. The writer must disavow cant of any kind, even at the cost of alienating himself from his or her accustomed political circles, and spill his or her political guts out. Nobody must be demonized. We all wear horns. We all wear angel wings. Except for the avowed hate groups that are warped. We must write with the idea that the other side is not simple but variegated and composed of very intelligent people who can listen to reason and passionately expressed argument. We must be alive on the page in a way that is intelligible to opposing factions. We must be more human than ever, admitting our own prejudices and blindness.

5. What would you say to those who can’t understand why Trump has so many Latino supporters?
The so-called Latino community is much more diverse and split than the media would have it. There is a great divide between people who have been here for generations but in some way identify as Latino and those newly arrived immigrants and their children. It’s real simple. Many Latinos are Americans first and possess the same fears as other Americans about heavy immigration, particularly illegal immigration, and the browning of America. Skin color doesn’t matter much or necessarily mean anything. The question of where you stand has to do with culture. Many Spanish-surname Americans or last-generation true Latinos, you might say, are not comfortable with the rapidity with which society has become más Latino. They don’t even speak Spanish. They like Trump’s idea of a wall because they feel overwhelmed by illegal immigration. They do not like America changing in the direction of a culture that is not properly speaking theirs, or not theirs in any real way.

Pim Wiersinga and Rotterdam’s Literary Scene

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Regal House author Pim WiersingaAs one of the participating authors (and organizers), I am proud to present:

CALL010

Chambres d’Amis Litteraire – Boulevard Rotterdam on Sunday 21 May, 2017, IETY café, 13.00 – 18.00 hrs

(In remembrance of Jan Hoet, curator in Ghent (1936-2014), who invented the concept.)

People need more art: without empathy and our imaginative faculties we are doomed to lose touch with our inexorable differences in the complex world of 2050. Says the Dutch Social and Cultural Planning Bureau.

CALL010 (010 being the Rotterdam area code) anticipates a future that’s artistic and grounded in physical space: In 2017, on May 21st, writers, musicians, and visual artists will perform in private homes now briefly open to the public, located in the Boulevard area.

During the afternoon, art aficionados push doorbells they never touched, enter, and then, after a welcome…a poet might take the floor, a saxophonist, or both. Half an hour has passed in the blink of an eye; then back on your feet again, moving on. Another doorbell. Different drinks, hosts, and artists, immersing you in a whole new universe. A singer-songwriter, a poet trying her hand at a short story, a visual artist, a fellow soul. Meet people you have never met before!

Poetry posters are on display behind various windows on ground floors.

A book (50 pages) will be for sale (at IETY café, the start & finish of the festival; price €10) containing authors’ texts, artist’s images, and a well-researched historical take on the Boulevard area––built in the 1900’s to keep industrial tycoons from moving out of town. Upon purchase, a Polaroid will be shot: you with your favourite author, stuck in the back of the book!

Pim Wiersinga and fellow novelist Bianca Boer will perform at Heemraadssingel 329, in the port of Rotterdam.

Wiersinga wrote several novels, including historical fiction. In 2017, he made his debut in English with a high profile ‘thriller-in-letters’, The Pavilion of Forgotten Concubines, set in late 18th century China.

Learn more at https://regalhousepublishing.com/pimwiersinga/ and http://pimwiersinga.nl/pavilion/

Writing Times with Lily Iona MacKenzie

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

For me, it isn’t a matter of managing it. Writing is as essential to me as eating, so I must find time to write each day. I’ve discovered, amidst teaching writing part time at the University of San Francisco (USF) and other colleges , helping to raise two stepchildren, serving as vice president of USF’s part-time faculty union, and other responsibilities, that if I write a minimum of one hour a day, I can accomplish a lot!

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 took on writing seriously in my late twenties. I started out focusing on poetry, and it still forms the foundation for my work. But I also am interested in short and long fiction, having written four+ novels and numerous short stories. I also love writing essays, from travel writing to book reviews, to critical essay

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

Having grown up in Canada, a country that embraces social justice, I moved to America in 1963 eager to support the Civil Rights Movement, as well as the feminists who were addressing all the inequalities women and others had suffered for centuries. Participating in this anthology seems a natural outcome of my life-long interest in pushing for a just society.

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

When I write, I don’t think about the polarized environment I live in. In fact, I never think about audience. As a writer, I try to dive below the social surface and capture some truth about what it means to be human. I don’t write for a particular audience or movement or particular ideology. I write to generate poetry, fiction, etc., that originates deep within myself and resonates with readers no matter what their backgrounds may be.

Do you think that self-revelation is part of the writing process?

I don’t think we can be serious writers without undressing completely, externally and internally, in our works. How else can we explore the vastness of life and its many dimensions? While we may be inventing characters and situations, fragments of our selves can’t help but be embedded in our work.  Some writers are more autobiographical than others and therefore more revealing in that sense. But even in my novel Curva Peligrosa, to be released in 2017, which is not at all autobiographical, I reveal myself in the ideas I explore there. I am not at all like the amoral main character, Curva Peligrosa, but I do share some of her attitudes and beliefs. So the autobiographical gets intertwined with the fiction, and a writer can’t avoid being revealed in the process.

Lily Iona MacKenzie, a Bay Area resident who currently teaches memoir writing to older adults at the University of San Francisco’s Fromm Institute, has published poetry, short fiction, and essays in over 150 Canadian and American publications. Her poetry collection All This was published in October 2011. Novels: Fling! was published in July 2015. Curva Peligrosa will be published in 2017. Freefall: A Divine Comedy will be released in 2018.

Connect with Lily:

Website

Facebook

Twitter

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!