Dennis Loy Johnson and Valerie Merians have chosen two ambitious projects with which to launch their new Hoboken-based publishing house – a pair of books that, for different reasons, are getting a lot of media attention.
Their compilation of 45 poems, Poetry after 9/11, is a poignant look at local scribes’ reactions to the terrorist attacks. After a successful first run of 7,000 copies, it’s already gone into a second printing.
On the flip side is A Reader’s Manifesto, a self-described “attack on the growing pretentiousness in American literary prose” that grew out of a controversial Atlantic Monthly article from last year. It has elicited interest from readers but also buzz from a publishing industry so competitive that it can’t help smirking a little when its most sacred cows get skewered.
Such are the results of a partnership between Johnson, a fiction writer and graduate of the esteemed Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and Merians, a poet and sculptor who uses photographs in her work.
Merians, who has lived in Hoboken for 11 years, met Johnson four years ago at an artists’ colony in New Hampshire. Soon after, Johnson joined her in Hoboken.
Johnson, who has taught writing at universities and published stories in the nation’s most prestigious literary magazines, has been writing a self-syndicated a column about the publishing industry for five years. His audience increased in April of 2001 when he took publishing gossip to the web with www.mobylives.com. (The site got a boost recently when it publicized the lopsided ratio of male to female writers contributing to the venerable New Yorker).
But even though the poke at the New Yorker, an institution most writers dream of breaking into, got a lot of attention for the site, it was not mainly frustration with the mainstream literary press that fueled the new publishing house.
It was 9/11.
“After 9/11, we happened to know a lot of poets,” Merians said. “Dennis put a lot of [their poems] on his site. Alicia Ostriker [who wrote an introduction to the book] sent poems after reading the site. Originally, we planned to do the book modestly and locally.”
But the project grew. “We saw poetry everywhere,” Johnson said. “Walls, bus stops…in the Hoboken Reporter’s letters. They were clearly by people who had never written a poem in their lives. It was really interesting because we live in a society that has been abandoning poetry. Clearly, straight prose wasn’t enough. It made us think, ‘Let’s find out what the poets are saying.'”
The compilation includes work from 45 metropolitan area poets. Since Johnson and Merians’ company, Melville House, enticed a major distributor, the books are available at stores nationwide.
“A lot of the poems in the book don’t actually talk about the events directly,” Merians said. “They talk about life in the aftermath.”
In “How to Write a Poem After September 11th,” Nikki Moustaki writes, “Don’t call the windows eyes. We know they saw it coming. / We know they didn’t blink. /…Say: we hated them then we loved them then they were gone./ …Say: If a man walks down stairs, somewhere / Another man is walking up.”
The book was released Sept. 1, but even before that, the response was overwhelming. The pair heard from CNN and NPR. After they appeared on a Long Island television station, a firefighter who had been at Ground Zero called them to thank them. He said that he had been writing poetry since 9/11, too. Johnson and Merians said that the call made them realize that they are already making a difference through their venture.
Some of the poets will participate in a reading on Sept. 11 at the New York Public Library.
A Reader’s Manifesto
Another goal of the publishing house, less artsy but equally important, is to make enough money to keep the company running – and their other book will help. B. R. Myers’ “A Reader’s Manifesto: An Attack on the Growing Pretentiousness in American Literary Prose” is a 134-page polemic against turgid writing. Since it attacks some of today’s most celebrated authors, it is sure to cause controversy.
In the book, Myers writes, “At the 1999 National Book Awards ceremony, Oprah Winfrey told of calling Toni Morrison to say she had to puzzle repeatedly over many of the latter’s sentences. According to Oprah, Morrison’s reply was: ‘That, my dear, is called reading.’ Sorry, my dear Toni, but it’s actually called bad writing.”
Myers takes aim at Don DeLillo, Paul Auster, David Guterson, Cormac McCarthy, and Annie Proulx. He brings up a point that comes up occasionally, although few have dared to slam the moderns. James Atlas expressed a similar sentiment in a 1997 New York Times essay titled “‘Literature’ bores me.” “Difficulty has become a virtue in itself,” he wrote. “‘Gravity’s Rainbow,’ ‘The Sot-Weed Factor,’ and David Foster Wallace’s recent ‘Infinite Jest’ are cult classics that have their fans, but do they have readers?”
B. R. Myers goes further, highlighting what he believes are overly artsy or dense passages and maintaining that good writing is concise and clear. He believes that many of the artsy writers who win literary prizes today make readers feel stupid. The Atlantic Monthly published a shorter version of the Manifesto last year, causing a firestorm.
At times, the book can seem overly picky, focusing on one sentence or charging that Don DeLillo uses “river” and “stream” as synonyms. Parse any 350-plus-page book and you can find a trite phrase or unnecessary dollop of treacle, and god help any writer who’s subject to a line-by-line audit. But Myers points out, in a defense against such criticism, that some of the sentences he isolated are the very same ones that had been singled out for praise by reviewers. He also notes in his introduction that the Atlantic took the lightheartedness and positive examples out of his work when they cut it down. The full-length Manifesto is a fun, meaty, and educational read that all types of readers can digest and enjoy. Where else can one find a recurring debate over whether Cormac McCarthy should have, in one passage, used the word “it” rather than repeating “tortilla”?
The handsome volume also includes a treat: Myers’ responses to critics of the original Atlantic article, and a clever tongue-in-cheek list of “Ten Rules for Serious Writers.” (He even gets in a few digs at Hoboken’s own Mark Leyner.)
Johnson said that Myers turned down advances from publishing companies who would have published the Manifesto in hard cover, preferring to make it accessible to everyday readers (which is, really, the point).
Slaying dragons
Johnson agrees with much of what Myers is saying about the publishing industry, and that is a reason, he says, that small presses will become more important in the future.
“Our publishing effort is based on the belief that the giants in the publishing business, Knopf, Random House, and the other major publishers, are involved in a dumbing down by putting out a homogenous product,” he said. “They’re dropping [quality] writers. We thought there was an easy niche to fill.”
He added, “They’re letting a lot of writers go not because they’re not good anymore, and not because they don’t make money, but because they’re not making enough money. They’re letting writers go who sell 20,000 or 30,000 but don’t sell 50,000 or 100,000. That means people like us have a chance.”
The swords used by Myers and Johnson are double-edged, as they are criticizing the kingmakers in an industry whose moat they often have to cross in order to progress. Johnson said that critics are usually afraid to pick apart the “Serious Writers” who are targets of the Manifesto, or are afraid to criticize literary giants like the New Yorker or the New York Times, as Johnson has on mobylives.com.
“I don’t think I’ve ever gotten more mail about a story,” he said of his article on the New Yorker’s male/female contributor ratio. “I get mail about that story every day. A lot of the mail is women saying, ‘Thank you for noticing. For a long time we were wondering when someone would say something about it.'”
“There are a lot of people who are angry about this right now,” he added. “They’re angry about the dumbing down of the mass media. They want more scrupulous coverage. They say people don’t miss it. I think this puts the lie to that.”
Johnson doesn’t deny that he knows it could have an adverse impact on his own career. “I know I’ll never get a review in the New York Times, or if I do, it won’t be pretty,” he said. “But you’ve got to speak the truth to authority. That’s what fiction writing is all about.”
Then again, maybe the Times is above all that – they’ve already published a long article on Johnson and Merians’ venture in the Sunday New Jersey Section.
In the future, Melville House hopes to publish five to six books a year, including a poetry book and approximately four fiction and “edgy” non-fiction entities. They’re also looking at older published projects that deserve to be revived. Their next offering may appear as early as spring.
“Hollywood kept making bigger and dumber movies,” he said. “Then independent films, which always existed, became a lot more [popular]. The indie book business is already coming about and thriving.”
Both of Melville House’s new books are available at major bookstores and on Amazon.com. For more information, check out www.melvillehousebooks.com.