The Heritage Month Project: "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" by Junot Diaz

Hispanic Heritage Month, one of the heritage months recognized by the U.S. State Department prior to 2025, runs from September 15 to October 15. For those of us very focused on traditional classifications/designations of time, mid-month to mid-month seems...wrong. However, a number of Latin American countries observe their independence days on September 15 or soon thereafter, so think outside the box, Gail.

I must admit upfront that in the past I associated Hispanic American literature with my back-in-the-day book discussion group. The books by Hispanic authors I read for book group I found difficult. Deep. Maybe stylistically outside my experience. Very literary? The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love by Oscar Hijuelos--There were only a couple of sentences in that book that registered with me, and they both dealt with Desi Arnez, who I had some previous knowledge of. Even the movie was lost on me. In the Time of the Butterflies by Julia Alvarez--that's pretty dramatic original material and all I could tell you about it is that everyone...... Well, that would be telling you the ending, so I won't. I think we read some magical realism, which is a big deal in Latin American literature and after that I avoided that genre. Even if you take the attitude that magical realism can exist in writing from nonLatin American writers, and I've heard that some people don't, I tend to avoid it now. Be magic...be real...be one or the other. 

In short, I wasn't looking forward to my Hispanic Heritage Month reading. But things have gone really well.

I Found Oscar

I cannot recall what led me to look into author Junot Diaz's work, other than I'd heard his name. I often say I can't recall why I read this or that, and it isn't because of some kind of mental lapse. Though would I recall it, if it were? No, it's because I juggle reading a great many things, as well as thinking about them. 

Pardon me for obsessing.

I became aware that Diaz has published in The New Yorker, and flash fiction, too! I could get a short sample, and I did with the lovely The Books of Losing You.

And so I went on to The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which I think I chose because it was available at a library I was in. Yes, I have crap reasons for reading the things I read. I shouldn't even mention them.

This is not one of the Hispanic-related books I was used to, even though it has markers of what some people would think of as a "literary" book. The story moves around a number of twentieth century periods, and a number of points of view. Much of the book has a narrator who remains unknown for a while. (He's Oscar's college roommate and his sister's sometime boyfriend.) There are footnotes. There's a lot of Spanish. There's what might be a curse.

On the other hand, though, there is Oscar, a sad, Dominican-American nerd who might be living under that family curse and who wants love so badly. His story is extremely engaging. Of course, everyone who has watched an episode of The Big Bang Theory thinks they know nerd culture. Oscar Wao reads as if author Junot Diaz really knew it back in 2007 when his book was published. Or I should say, knew it in the '90s, the period when Oscar was living. Who doesn't love a nerd, wherever he comes from?

A Little Bit of What We're Dealing With Here

A lot of footnotes. Footnotes were a thing in fiction for a while. I have a family member who intensely dislikes them used that way, but I enjoy them. I liked what Diaz did with them here. He uses them to explain the Dominican Republic world that earlier generations of Oscar's family lived in under the Trujillo regime there. I had actually heard of Trujillo, probably because I'd read In the Time of the Butterflies, which Diaz mentions. Meaning I got something out of that book. I realized he was bad news, but I couldn't have told you what country in which he was bad news. Meaning I didn't get very much out of that book. Diaz places the bulk of his Trujillo history in footnotes, but he handles that history with wit. Could readers skip the footnotes, which is probably what many readers of nonfiction do with footnotes there, and still get a story in Oscar Wao? Probably, but the footnotes are fantastic. It's hard not to compare our own times to the Trujillo era, which most readers probably weren't doing in 2007 when this book was published. As grim as things are now, they are not Trujillo grim.

A lot of Spanish. I've read that there are some objections to the amount of Spanish in this book. I don't feel you had to understand it to follow the story. What's more, this is a story about Spanish speaking people. Wouldn't a book about Spanish-speaking people with little or no Spanish be a book about Spanish-speaking people for nonSpanish people? What am I trying to say here? Would it be a book about Spanish-speaking people that English-speaking people would be comfortable with? I read a book about Spanish-speaking people but they weren't Spanish enough to speak Spanish? 

I have to admit, though, that I did wish the Spanish was French. Because I study French, de temp en temp, and I would have looked up what I didn't know, and my French would have improved so much! So I was patient with the Spanish. Someone's Spanish probably improved as a result of reading this book.

The curse. I am not a fan of curses, but this one provided a connection between characters. It was a sort of storyline. A recurring theme, perhaps.

In short, there is a great deal to like about this book.

Has Oscar Influenced Another Book?

Earlier this year, I read The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne by Ron Currie. The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao brought it back to mind. The books' titles are similar, both in terms of how they're structured and in terms of them tipping readers off to the fates of the main characters. Both books deal with an ethnic group in America, Dominican Americans in one case, Franco-Americans in the other. Both make use of a language other than English in the text, Spanish for Oscar Wao and French for Babs Dionne. (There's far more Spanish in Oscar Wao than there is French in Babs Dionne. I'm going to make a wild guess here that Diaz is more fluent in Spanish than Currie is in French, but that may just be me overidentifying with another Franco-American author.) In Oscar Wao we have the nightmarish Trujillo back in the Dominican Republic. In Babs Dionne we have a pretty terrifying criminal back in Canada. Both books also have a touch of the supernatural. In Oscar Wao there is that curse. In Babs Dionne there is a character who suffers from hallucinations in which she communicates with the dead.

I should be writing an undergraduate paper, shouldn't I? 

Yes, my Hispanic Heritage Month reading is off to a good start.

Friday Done List September 12

Goal 1. Write and Publish Adult Short Stories, Essays, and Humor

• Received a rejection for an essay, found another publication for it, and resubmitted. 
• Writers' Workshops Aren't Just For Those With Time and Money published at New Writers Welcome! This is another compilation and revision of material originally used here.
• Finished a draft of a short story. It's a second draft, actually. I did the first one maybe a year or two back.
• Worked on a second short story.
• Attended a flash writing workshop.
• Changed that draft as a result of the writing workshop.
• Just barely began some humor thoughts.

Goal 2. Build Community/Market Work/Brand Myself and My Work

• A blog post last weekend.
• Worked on the next Heritage Month post
• Finished some reading for Hispanic American Heritage Month.
• Picked up some books from the library for other months coming up.
• Promoted new essay publication at Facebook and BlueSky.

Goal 3. Submit book-length Work to Agents and Editors 

• Went over a list of four agents I was thinking of submitting to. One had little web presence. A couple I didn't feel right about, and they were closed to submissions. I submitted nothing.
• Read To Go Big or Come Home by Tom McAllister about his experience publishing with traditional publishers and then trying to find an agent post publishing. It sounded very familiar to me. Confirms my feeling that I want to go short-form writing now. Though, like McAllister, I wouldn't walk away from a book offer.

Goal 4. Play with the 19th Century Novel Idea, Which Does Have a Name Now, But is Mainly a Fun Think Piece

• Made some notes

The Weekend Writer: Some Query Letter Critiques

I just stumbled upon author Mindy McGinniss' blog in which she critiques query letters. This is interesting stuff, at least as far as I've read.

McGinness is the author of The Female of the Species, which I liked. A lot.

Friday Done List September 5

Goal 1. Write and Publish Adult Short Stories, Essays, and Humor  

• Worked on a flash fiction piece I started quite some time ago and began revising last week.
  
• Watched Creative Academy's interview with Mary Robinette Kowal about writing short stories, as part of my short story study. This was so good.
• Submitted a short story to a lit journal.
• Rewrote some blog material into a piece to submit to a Medium publication.
• Submitted to Medium publication.

Goal 2. Build Community/Market Work/Brand Myself and My Work

•  Weekend Writer post. Promoted on Facebook and BlueSky
• National Book Festival post. Promoted on Facebook, BlueSky, and Goodreads.
• Watched Authors' Guild Foundation's How and Where to Find Your Readers with Andrea Guevera, who really did offer a different spin on branding/marketing, which is why I'm trying to get active on my Goodreads blog again.
• Continued reading for Heritage Month Project.

National Book Festival Is This Saturday, September 6

During the height of the pandemic, the National Book Festival was fully on-line, and I "attended" a few events. This was one of the pandemic activities that opened me up to the incredible possibilities for readers and writers on-line. Yes, I know I was just writing about this yesterday. It was life changing, okay?

This year's festival  is this Saturday, one day instead of three, as it was in 2020. During that one day you can still do some live streaming, and videos of all the speakers are supposed to be available after the festival is over. 

Oh, look! The videos from last year! If I had all the time in the world, I'd watch the one on the history of community cookbooks. Yes, seriously, I would.

Here is the list of authors' presenting. Children's writers are well represented. My favorite historian will be there. It appears that all authors have a resent book that is being featured, in case you see some favorite writers there and want to see what they're up to.

The Weekend Writer: Getting Ready for OUR School Year

September is upon us, the time of year when writers' organizations start running workshops.  During the pandemic years, some organizations ran virtual workshops, and when things became less dire, they moved to hybrid programs, an in-house workshop for the locals and a virtual one for me. 

How I love a virtual writers' workshop.

I've gone on here before about the benefits of virtual workshops: Less expense, less of a time commitment, less travel--none at all, in fact. So let's just take a look at what's being offered this year.

Your Choices Are:

Off Campus Writers' Workshop. The Off Campus Writers Workshop out of the Chicago area is my favorite workshop site. The organization is eighty years old and may be the oldest of its type in the U.S. They offer something every Thursday morning from September into May. That's Central Time, by the way. Is Thursday morning inconvenient for you? OCWW records all workshops and sends registrants a copy that they can access at their leisure for a week. This is your cheapest option, at least, the cheapest I've found. Workshops are $25 each for nonmembers, $10 for members. Membership is only $40 a year, with the year ending in the summer. Membership pays for itself in workshop discounts. I know. I'm a member. Workshop leaders are writers, most with some kind of teaching experience, many with academic teaching experience. I've seen some pretty big name people there. Want to stick to generative workshops, nothing lecture-like? They've got some.  This year's workshop schedule. 

Thurber House. I've also attended a couple of workshops through the Thurber House in Columbus, Ohio. These workshops are a little more expensive than OCWW's, and the prices vary. They are still a buy, especially when you consider many writers' workshops are through conferences, so you have to pay for a day or more of attendance, even if there's only one workshop you're interested in. This fall's workshop schedule. These are evening workshops at Eastern time

Pioneer Vally Writers' Workshop. The Pioneer Valley Writers' Workshop in Northampton, Massachusetts is totally new to me. I only just heard about it. (I already can't remember how, but I think BlueSky had something to do with it.) Their pricing is also higher than OCWW's, though, once again, a good buy. And get this...they offer gift cards. This fall's workshop schedule. Most of these are Saturday workshops at 1:00 PM, but check carefully. I hope to make it to Anna North's Friday evening essay workshop in December. I read her novel, Outlawed, this summer, and liked it a great deal. Again, Eastern Time.

Are There More Virtual Writers' Workshops Out There?

I'm guessing the answer to that question is "Yes." Which is too bad for me, because I have a ridiculously long list of workshops I want to attend this year just from these three organizations.

The Return of the Friday Done List...Which I Hadn't Noticed Was Gone

Done lists and I go back almost ten years. I often see people making jokes about adding something to their to-do list just so they can cross it out. They don't need to laugh about it. That's a very legitimate thing to do. 

Done Lists Serve Four Purposes

• Psychological: Yeah, you feel good about having done something, and there's nothing wrong with feeling good.
• Motivational: Realizing you've done something and are capable of doing something provides motivation to do more.
• Planning: Keeping track of what you've done/completed helps you determine what you still have to do.
• Focus: If, like me, you tie your done list to your goals and objectives, a done list helps you make sure you're spending time on tasks that mean something to you and that you believe, or believed when you made your goals and objectives, anyway, will move you forward professionally. Also, if you are like me, as you get closer to the point when you're going to make a done list, you'll hustle a little bit to at least work on an objective, if not knock it off. Stay on task.

I like done lists so much that I maintained one here at the blog from August 18, 2023 to Feb. 13, 2025. And then, without even realizing it or missing it, I stopped. It just drifted away.

Losing My Done List

I think my done list disappeared because I got distracted by the effort I was making to read and write for the Heritage Month Project, which also involved rewriting some of my Heritage Month posts to submit to Books Are Our Superpower. And, of course, there are always family distractions, the same kind everyone experiences. I'm just not very good at dealing with them. I consciously cut back on blog writing this past year, thinking I was making time for other things, conserving energy. Which sounds  positive, but the done list got cut without me even thinking about it.

I have definitely felt my done list's loss without realizing that the loss was because I no longer had a done list. For many months now, I've felt that I've been hardly working.  Going back to a done list will indicate, why, yes, Gail, it's true. You have hardly been working. Get moving. Or it will indicate that I've done more than I think I have.

Friday Done List for the Week August 24 Through 29 

Goal 1. Write and Publish Adult Short Stories, Essays, and Humor        

• Began revising a humor piece to turn into a short story.
• Made one submission.
• Received one rejection. 
• Went through Off Campus Writing Workshop's list of workshops for next year and selected the ones I want to take.
• Went through Thurber House Writing Workshop's list of workshops for next year and selected one I want to take.
• Did the weekly short story study that I began doing at the end of February, though it doesn't appear to have been an objective for this goal. I missed doing this for two months this summer.
• Created another reading system for market research, which replaces another system I had as an objective and failed with.

Goal 2. Build Community/Market Work/Brand Myself And My Work

• No annotated reading posts, which I eliminated earlier this year, because of the work involved with the Heritage Month Project. That's over. Don't miss those.
• Worked on enlarging followers on BlueSky.
• Did two skeets (don't you love that?) at BlueSky of old blog posts related to my literary tourism.
• Did a skeet at BlueSky of a blog post on the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, since that just finished.
• Did a skeet at BlueSky linking to an article I wrote years ago at The Millions on the Bread Loaf Writers Conference.
• Did a couple of skeets of Medium humor pieces I've written in the past.
• Shared two Facebook posts on local writer events.
• Have been reading for the next Heritage Month post coming up in a few weeks.

Goal 3. Submit book-length Work to Agents and Editors 

• Received a rejection from one of the two agents I submitted to last week.
• Stumbled upon a few more agents I'll submit to next week.

So, What Does This Tell You, Gail?

• I am doing something.
• However, I'm not generating much new work. Which I knew. But seeing it in a done list is helpful. I don't want to see so little new writing in future done lists.

Another Professional Project Is a DANDY Idea

I'm sure you all recall my recent post (the last one?) about the difficulty of determining which literary agents to submit work to. Well, something similar, though easier in my humble opinion, goes on with seeking out markets for short-form writing. There are hundreds of possibilities to sort through. So much to read and decide which journals/sites would be interested in your work.

During Lent this year, I took on a daily short story reading project that I thought would teach me something about writing short stories. It did not. Soon after starting it, I gave up any hope that it would help me in checking markets. My efforts were totally unfocused and random, and I was just trying to get the job done.

Which I did, but for what?

So, of course, I got really excited yesterday when I came up with a similar plan for researching short-form writing markets.

The Kind-of-Daily Market Research Project

I have this Ranking of 500 Fiction Litmags by Erika Krouse. Oh, my gosh. She's got one for litmags that only publish creative nonfiction, too. Now I'm really excited. 

So, the new project is to just casually check out a magazine from the list, read a few things, look at their submission guidelines, and consider whether or not I have something I can submit there. We're going to be calm about this. Which means:

• No reading for the sake of reading. 
• No reading to meet a daily goal.
• Just familiarize myself with some new publications and be grateful for whatever I get done.

Today's Research Project: Five Points

Five Points: A Journal of Literature and Art doesn't make all its material available on-line. And what it does offer isn't a complete story or essay. But it has a pretty incredible blog. Consider:

• "Help Eleanor Come Home": The Queer Horror of Hill House by Eve Clark. If I had all the time in the world, I'd read The Haunting of Hill House again. (I have a copy, so I could!) That would be for the third time, since I read it once as a teenager and once after the Netflix series.
• Pride and Prejudice & The Awakening: What is food if not domestication or temptation? by Karen Sims. This is fantastic! I didn't care for The Awakening when I read it sometime after college. Again, if I had all the time in the world, I'd read it again. (I have a copy, so I could!) Food and eating appear in a lot of my own writing. I'm going to be paying a lot more attention when I read it in other writers' work now. "Domestication or temptation."

I Just Did Some Book Submissions. Thank God That's Over.

Though I am primarily interested in short-form writing these days, I periodically submit one of my book-length manuscripts to an agent or agents. I respect my own work (and the effort that went into it), and every now and then, I feel I should show it.

Earlier this year, I saw an article on boutique literary agencies and decided I'd read it. And I finally did. I collected a few names to research there. And I had a few names I collected elsewhere. 

I spent a lot of my writing time the last couple of weeks researching, as I said above. Researching literary agents is a lot like stalking them. You hunt them up on-line. You read interviews they've given. You look for their Manuscript Wish Lists. You see if they're on BlueSky or Twitter, whichever one you favor. Maybe you see if they're on Facebook, though that may be where they post their more personal stuff, and that really is like stalking them. You sign up for Publisher's Marketplace for a month (it's going up to $30 a month September 1, by the way) so you can see if they've sold the type of book you're planning to submit to them. 

If you're smart, I've learned because I wasn't, you'll go to their agency website first, because that's where they'll announce that they're closed to submissions. Believe me, you don't want to have invested a lot of time and effort in stalking an agent only to find out s/he is closed to submissions.

I started out with a group of ten names this go round. By the time I eliminated the people who were not accepting submissions, who represented only children's authors or nonfiction, who were interested in romance or science fiction, who had never sold a mystery, who hadn't sold anything in several years, I was down to two people.

So this go-round of submissions went out to just two people.

I did do some revising of my submission letter, though, with a new hook/pitch line. That can only be good in the future, right?

Why Are My Submission Numbers So Low? Spoiler: I Don't Know 

Well, that's not accurate. I know why my numbers are so low. I don't know why other writers' numbers are so high.

I have submitted 143 Canterbury Road to 19 agents (maybe an editor is included in that number) now. Over many years I have submitted to a little over 100 agents relating to 5 different manuscripts.  Some of these agents I have submitted multiple projects to, so that raises my submission numbers a bit.

According to things I've read, though, I have not submitted very widely. I've read about writers who submitted to over 200 agents for just one book, got multiple shows of interest, and then ended up with representation. And a book sale. I've seen that type of thing more than once.

Where do they find so many agents to submit to?

Yes, there are hundreds of agents out there. But writers are advised not to carpet bomb them. We're supposed to target agents who are interested in the kind of work we do. The likelihood of me convincing a nonfiction agent that he's been waiting for years for my comedy about two slacker churchgoers saving a mainstream church from Christian Nationalists doesn't seem great enough to waste both our time with a submission to him.

Even if you had 20 or 30 agents who were interested in exactly the kind of thing you write, submitting to them is a lot of work. Every letter needs to be personalized as to why you are submitting to this particular person. Agents require different numbers of pages with a sub. Some want a synopsis. Agents who use submission forms don't all use the same submission form. You may have to come up with different material for different agents. 

To do all that to submit to an agent you know can't possibly be interested in your book seems either foolishly optimistic or inept. 

But are other people doing it, and it's working for them? In which case they're not being foolishly optimistic or inept?

But I obsess.

Next Week

Next week I have an essay and a short story to submit. I want to get back to my short story study and plan my workshop attendance for the year and write a blog post. And, finally, get back to some generative work.

That means, of course, writing.

Man, I Feel Like A Writer

Roland Denes on Unsplash

 Doo, doooo, doo, doo, doo-doo.

On Monday, my most recent humor piece, Sure, You're Going to LOVE Being a Grandmother: But let me give you some advice was published at Frazzled, possibly my favorite publication at Medium.

I also received my hard copy of the Stonecoast Review in which my short story What We Do appears, as well as a copy of The Authors Guild Bulletin. No, I don't have any writing in that, but it is hold-in-your-hand evidence that I'm a member and arriving the same day as Stonecoast Review, as it did, makes me feel very writery.

On top of all that, I got two rejections within a couple of hours on Sunday, just the day before. Rejections are a good thing. Not great, of course, but good, because they indicate you're working. You're in the game.

While none of what I experienced Monday involves the contracts and book reviews and appearances of days-of-old, they are work activity. They are the work activity of a short-form writer.

I Went For A Book Walk Last Weekend Part 2

Truthfully, it's been a couple of weekends now. 

The Struggle To Sell

Events like the book walk organized by Nutmeg Lit Fest last month are all about bringing readers and books together. Which sounds very nice. What they're really about is money, which doesn't sound as nice. We are talking about marketing books. Whether you are a self-published or traditionally published author, marketing is difficult. In large part this is due to the 2 million books that are published each year, which I mentioned last time. There are nowhere near enough readers to read all those books. In fact, as I also mentioned, eighty percent of those books will sell fewer than 100 copies.

Given those facts, being able to sell more than 100 copies of a book becomes a major achievement. But what about some other figures?

A Traditionally Published Author

Hal Johnson sketching in my book

I met Hal Johnson, the author of  Impossible Histories, published by a Macmillan imprint, at the book walk. He was one of two traditionally published authors I talked to, though there may have been more there. In our conversation, Johnson said that he took part in events like this one because traditional publishers don't do much marketing anymore. This is something I hear a lot to the point that I'd almost call it common knowledge now. But I don't really know what it means, because it's been so long since I've had a book published, myself.

Back in my day, boys and girls, marketing from traditional publishers involved:

• Sending arcs of your books to professional review sites
• Including your books in their seasonal catalogs
• Maybe taking your book to teacher and library conferences 
• If your book received a certain number of starred reviews, you'd get an advertisement in a professional publication of some sort
• The Hero of Ticonderoga was included in a one of those box displays in bookstores, but I can't remember why.

Are traditional publishers doing less of the above now? Or does the above have less impact because of the overwhelming number of books out there? 

It doesn't matter, of course. The end result is the same. It's hard to sell traditionally published books.

My husband and I used to think that handselling like we saw at the book walk didn't matter, because the number of books you'd sell would be so small, it couldn't have an impact. But, remember, eighty percent of books published sell fewer than 100 copies. You want to sell more than 100 copies to get into the twenty percent! That seems doable by making the effort to handsell at events like this. Remember, someone told me at this book walk that s/he had sold 200 copies of a book in a few months. 

But what about the income involved, Gail? For a number of years, conventional wisdom claimed that most traditionally published books don't sell enough copies to earn back the author's advance, the advance being an advance against sales that traditional publishers pay authors upfront when they agree to publish a book. Recently (meaning just now) I've read that that isn't necessarily true. At any rate, the advance isn't the only money traditional publishers invest in books. They have to pay for:

• all editing, 
• layout and design, 
• interior artwork, if there is any, 
• cover illustrations, 
• design of the covers, 
• and all the marketing listed above. 

Will selling more than 100 books cover all that, making you look like a desirable risk your publisher might publish again? How many books do you have to sell to do that? Beats me.

The Self-Published Authors

Mike Jakubowski

Mike Jakubowski, author of The Kings of Beacon and Joey and the Ocean of Possiblities, was one of
the first authors I spoke to. I was drawn to his covers and learned that he had a friend who did the illustrations and another friend who did the design work for them. We agreed this was very significant, because the cost of self-publishing can get up there. 

In fact, that's why I always call self-published writers self-published and not independent. They have to bear the burden of finding people to do all the work described above that traditional publishers do for the books they publish, and they have to pay for it. Themselves. There are companies that will do that for writers, and I've seen costs for that going anywhere from $5,000 to $10,000. The companies I've read about didn't include a developmental editor, which is the most important and possibly the most expensive part of publishing.

But what about the income involved, Gail? You often see not having to share income with a publisher as being one of the benefits of self-publishing. But without a publisher, you don't have anyone to take on the financial risk of publishing. Authors have to pay for everything. Themselves. 

How many books do they have to sell to cover their expenses? Again, it beats me.

Gail Is Impressed

Yes, when I go to any of these book events, I am greatly impressed by the effort and ingenuity and expense the authors attending put into their marketing materials. 

I'm talking serious posters, for instance, such as the one that Greg Gilmartin had made of his book covers. In fact, glossy book cover posters are a very common thing. I still have a poster a book fair made of one of my covers, but it was some kind of digital printout glued to a poster board. In two decades things have improved. 

I saw table coverings like the one Hal Johnson had made printed with his book covers.

I try not to pick up bling at festivals, because I dabble in minimalism and environmentalism. So I don't have much of that to show. But we're not talking the Kinko's black and white bookmarks I handed out in schools back in the day or the business cards we made on our printer. We're talking about beautiful things. Lots of them printed on both sides!

Don't I sound as if I just came out of the hills?

What really freaks me out, though, are the canopies.

These writers often market outdoors, and in addition to lugging a fold-up table of some sort and a chair, they also have to carry canopies with them to protect them from the sun and, presumably, some light rain. 

Jordan Lopez has a canopy.

As does Kelly Jarvis.

 

And Sarah P. Blanchard.

 

One of 4 book walk stations.

As did most of the authors at the Wethersfield Book Walk. 

Now, I have a canopy on my deck. It's horrible to work with. The one we have now is only a year old, and we've already punched a hole in it. Dealing with canopies is not a minor task. These writers are putting in a lot of personal, physical work to market their books. 

I'm going to be honest. I don't want to say I'm too lazy to do this kind of thing, but I'm too lazy to do this kind of thing. I have cases of my out-of-print books and thought about trying to join an upcoming event just to sell off what I've got. But then I said, No. No, no, no.

There is at least one other group in Connecticut that organizes events for writers handselling their books. But this kind of thing is happening all over the country. Shopping for books in this way may be becoming as common as shopping in bookstores. Or on Amazon. 

The Heritage Month Project: "Blind Man's Bluff" by James Tate Hill

While Disability Pride Month (July) is recognized by a number of groups, it doesn't appear to have ever been observed by the U.S. government as a heritage month. Nonetheless, July was kind of free as heritage month reading goes, and what you might call disability literature isn't something I think I've ever sought out, so I decided to go for it.

You can find lists of books featuring disability. I was attracted to Mystery – The Disability Book Archive,  but then was thrown because it included a book about vampires, who I don't think of as disabled. (This led me to much speculating about what, exactly,  disability is, which I will spare you. You're welcome.) I wish now that I'd spent more time going through The Disability Book Archive's other genre offerings.  I did look at Book Riot's 20 Must-Read Fiction and Nonfiction Books About the Disability Experience, though. It had a lot of memoir, and I was hoping for fiction at that point.

Yes, I am so freaking picky.

One way or another, it's the end of July, and I've only read one disability-related book, the memoir Blind Man's Bluff by James Tate Hill. I ran into Hill on BlueSky, where he comes across as being very congenial. (The first thing I look for in a writer, I guess.) His memoir describes his efforts to hide his blindness, something he had a shot at doing, because he became legally blind in his mid-teens, being left with some modest vision. (I think the cover of his book is an attempt at replicating what he can see.) The book is also described as humorous, which is always a draw for me.

So here was an intriguing situation, with humor. I was in. 

First, Hill does have a dry, self-deprecating sense of humor that I definitely appreciate. 

Second, what most intrigued me about this book was not the disability/blindness. What intrigued me was the way it was about transitioning from high school to college and from college to the work world and from single life to married life. Yes, Hill had to do all these things I recognize while working out how he would get his college reading done, how he would mentally map out how he'd get to classes, how he would find the men's room in restaurants and bars, and how he would, as a college instructor, deal with the issue of students raising their hands to speak, since he couldn't see them. Also, he risked his life every time he crossed a road. But there was still much that he was living through that many seeing people live through, also.

I don't want to downplay the significance of the blindness Hill deals with. But what struck me about this book was not how different he is, but how much he is the same. He just can't see.

The "Bluff" Aspect of This Book

The young Hill didn't like to address his vision with new people. He didn't like to talk about what he couldn't do. When he did feel he had to deal with it, with new people he expected to have to interact with in the future, for instance, he would say something about having blindspots that made it too hard to do something. "Too hard. Never impossible. Not once had I ever said I can't drive; it was always I don't drive, which wasn't a lie. I didn't drive. If that particular verb left room for one to infer choice, so be it."

That idea of choice seems significant to me. When he lost his sight at sixteen due to Leber's hereditary optic neuropathy, Hill didn't just lose his vision. He lost the choice to do so many things, choices that sighted people have. And that may be a big factor in why he tried to keep his blindness to himself as much as he could. He didn't want to make his lack of choice obvious to the world.

At one point, though, he says, "I had accomplished less than many blind people who acknowledged their disability."

He was still young, though. He had time.

The Writer Aspect of This Book

I'm not sure if I've read other writer memoirs. I can recall reading my-mother-was-horrible memoirs and my-oddball-dad memoirs and collections of essays about aging women or young humor writers. I can't believe I've never read a writer memoir, but I have to say that Hill as a young writer seemed familiar to me not because I'd read about writers, but because I am one.

He writes about how he became a reader after he lost his sight, through audio books. He writes about editing his work. He quotes F. Scott Fitzgerald. He gets an agent!

This, to me, illustrated that a disability isn't everything a person is. This person was a writer like me. In fact, one who right now is doing more than I am professionally.

I am still here, though. I have time, too.

The Memoirist Now

I don't want to say. I don't want to take another writer's story. Read his book. Oh, wait! I will share that there was a section of this book, which was probably the most painful, and that was only marginally involved with his blindness. Unless, of course, I've got that wrong and it was intricately involved with his blindness. Anyway, that was a part that really kept drawing me in in a when-is-what-I-am-damn-sure-is-going-to-happen going to happen? way.

A Couple of Other Options

While going over disability reading lists, I did find a couple of novels I'd read. And written about here!

Tru Biz by Sarah Novic, an adult book that deals with a deaf school that both my sister (for what that's worth) and I liked. It also won the Alex Award.

The War That Saved My Life , a middle grade book by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley, turned up somewhere on a disability reading list. This is a book I liked, and I liked the sequel even more. These are books that fall into the World War II British child evacuation genre. I'm assuming there's a genre, because there are so many of them. Not complaining about that. I have enjoyed a lot of those books. In this one, main character Ada has a clubfoot that was ignored by her abusive mother. 

If you followed my link to my post on the subject, you saw that I didn't even mention Ada's disability. I had trouble recalling it until I read a review of the book at a site that focuses on disability. What was my thinking about that? Can't even begin to guess.

I do think that the reading I've done this month, limited as it was, will change my perception of how disability is portrayed in the future.

I don't have any Heritage Month reading planned for August. I hope I can use that time to read ahead for September.

I Went For A Book Walk Last Weekend Part 1

Last weekend I attended the Book Walk organized by Nutmeg Lit Fest in Wethersfield, Connecticut. A one-mile round trip walk on a ridiculously nice day.

Nutmeg Lit Fest is an organization that promotes its Connecticut writer members. Because many of those members are self-published, they may not get many opportunities for their books to be featured in bookstores. (Two million books are supposed to be published annually. Bookstores can't absorb all of them.) Self-published writers, then, have to rely on handselling. The Nutmeg Lit Fest Facebook group provides support for these writers, publicizing their events.

Additionally, Nutmeg Lit Fest's partners, among them Heidi Rocha (sorry I don't have the names of the others), organize events like Old Wethersfield Book Walk for its authors to meet the public and sell books in unique venues such as shopping areas with foot traffic or at town events. The writers bring some shoppers to the area, the area already has shoppers, and a sort of symbiotic/mutualism relationship is created. (No, I don't know much about biology. Let's think metaphorically here, okay?)

Heidi Rocha

There used to be a few traditional literary festivals in Connecticut, but they began disappearing even before the pandemic. We cannot blame the loss of the Connecticut Children's Book Fair on that. With book festivals. though, readers/shoppers still have to come to the books, just as they have to come to the books in bookstores. The Connecticut Children's Book Fair was successful, pulling in 2,000 people a weekend I was told once, but those were people interested in children's books and willing to make their way to the fair. The fair was in Storrs, home of the main University of Connecticut campus. No one has ever called Storrs a convenient location.

Something Different

One of at least 4 Book Walk stops

What Nutmeg Lit Fest does that is different is bring books to people instead of hoping people will come to the books. Last weekend that set-up worked very well.

The Authors Guild Bulletin includes a chapter called The Cruelty—and Possibilities— of 21st-Century Book Promotion by Michael Castleman (The Untold Story of Books). In it Castleman says that an average of 2 million books a year are published, as I've already mentioned. Eighty percent of those books, he says, including books from traditional publishers, will sell fewer than 100 copies, a figure I've seen before. 

Even if you subtract textbooks, which have a captive audience, from the 2 million yearly published books, we're still talking hundreds of thousands of books coming out every single year, piled up on top of what was published in years past. I don't know how many readers are out there, but I'm going to stick my head out that there aren't hundreds of thousands of them. All the regular readers who read multiple...or many... books a year, cannot read all the books that are being turned out.

On Saturday, one of the writers I spoke to said he (or she, I truly can't remember who it was) had sold 200 copies of a book in a few months. That didn't sound like much until I read Castleman's article yesterday and was reminded of the 100-copy figure. 

Which brings me back to Nutmeg Lit Fest and the something different it does. Because Nutmeg Lit Fest takes its authors out into the community, it is exposing its authors and their books to people in the community who may not be traditional readers who would go to a bookstore or a literary festival. 

To sell more books, you have to find more readers. You have to create readers who were not readers before. You don't do this in bookstores and literary festivals, which attract people who are already readers. You have to go where the nonreaders are.

Handselling Is A Lot Of Work

Back in my day, boys and girls, as a traditionally published writer I could rely on my publisher to do the bulk of my bookselling. I created a website, started blogging, marketed myself as a speaker to schools, and became involved with social media. It seemed like a lot to do at the time, especially when it is so difficult to determine your Return on Investment for any individual book marketing attempt. Except for situations like school appearances that might involve the school selling your books to students or even buying some, it's hard to tell which things you did that resulted in a sale.

The writers I've been seeing at the Nutmeg Lit Fest Facebook page (I'm a member) and at the two events it sponsored that I attended are doing a great deal more. I'll get into more of that in my next post.

What I will say for now is that in days of old, I had a network of sorts with children's writers in New England. These days I am building connections with writers in Connecticut. 

Gerald E. Augustine

I've met Gerald E. Augustine, author of Vietnam Beyond and the subject of Passion in Life, twice now. Same with Heidi Roche. There were at least two other authors at Saturday's event that I've met.

Wesleyan University Press

Wesleyan University Press, a Connecticut publisher, had a table at Saturday's event. Though this was my first contact with the organization, I used to know Susan Campbell, the author of a couple of the books it was featuring. 

Jennifer Regan-Lefebre

Another university press, University of California Press, published Jennifer Regan-Lefebre's book, Imperial Wine, which interested me because while I only drink cheap wine (but not that cheap) I am a sucker for history books, which is what Imperial Wine is. I had not met Jennifer before, but she is a historian, and I am a history reader. She's also a professor at Trinity College in Hartford, which, wouldn't you know it, I did not attend. But years ago, I'm talking maybe decades, I somehow managed to wrangle my way into a free essay symposium there. (I did something similar at UConn. I used to be shameless. Now I'm too lazy to do things like that.) Anyway, I feel connection, people. It takes very little for me to feel that. 

Next time I'll be covering other writers who appeared at Old Wethersfield Book Walk and discussing some of the marketing they're doing.

What Passes for Professional Self-improvement Here

My Personal Short Story Study

Over the last few months, I've been "studying" short story writing by going over notes from workshops I've taken. I'm done with that. Now I've started going through material I've collected and saved on the subject, including an article listing the best short stories to teach yourself how to write. 

So far, these seem like the best short stories to encourage you to give up writing altogether. Or maybe even reading.

Pinterest

Then today I read Pinterest Is My Best-Kept Author Marketing Secret by Melissa Bourbon at Jane Friedman. Bourbon says that followers don't matter at Pinterest, because it's a search engine. You can use it to direct people to your writing.

Well, I'm on Pinterest, and though I don't have much to sell, I thought maybe I could use it to encourage people to read my humor, essays, and short stories. Maybe I could use Pinterest to get my name out for that kind of writing now that I'm not writing children's books.

Well, I took a look at my Pinterest boards, which I haven't touched in 3 years. As you can see from the menu to the left, I don't even link to it here. I think I forgot about it. I sure hope followers truly don't matter there, because I only have 14. And the page seems kind of a mess of both my writing, my design work for characters in books that never found publishers, and things I'm just interested in. (Learning French!) 

I did a little searching to see what other writers are doing on Pinterest, and it seems the same. Though they seem to have more boards. And are there all that many writers there? Really? 

So maybe I'll do a little work on Pinterest, but it will be low priority.

Lower than the short story study.

The Heritage Month Project: "A Distinct Alien Race" and Eugenics

This is it, folks. My last reading post for National Immigrant Heritage Month  related to Franco- Americans and the very fine A Distinct Alien Race by David Vermette.

I have no recollection of ever hearing about the eugenics movement in school, though I was a history minor in college.  In the early twentieth century eugenics, the belief that humanity could be improved through selective breeding, became popular enough in the United States that in 1927 the Supreme Court in Buck v Bell found that "The Virginia statute providing for the sexual sterilization of inmates of institutions supported by the State who shall be found to be afflicted with an hereditary form of insanity or imbecility, is within the power of the State under the Fourteenth Amendment."

Eugenics was a national and international movement, culminating in the Holocaust. 

It wasn't until around 25 years ago while I was taking my one graduate course, which was on essay writing (I aced it, since I know you're all wondering), that I stumbled upon eugenics. I was working on an essay for that class that would one day become Dinner at Shirley Farr's House. At that point, the essay was about a local rube (me) who managed to get into a wealthy person's house by way of the restaurant someone had opened in it after her death, enjoyed the place, and then it became even more of a wealthy person's place, ruining her bliss. I decided I should see if I could find anything about Shirl on-line. The woman definitely used her wealth to help her community. She also used it to support something called The Eugenics Survey of Vermont. and did so for ten years. The survey involved research on families as part of the Vermont Eugenics Project, and it would eventually lead to Vermont's own sterilization law in 1931. (It was one of 30 states to have one.) The goal was to reduce the "population of Vermont's "social problem group."

And What Does This Have to do With Franco-Americans, Gail?

Well, it has plenty to do with them, as Vermette says in his chapter on eugenics in A Distinct Alien Race. He refers to a writer named Madison Grant who believed that the U.S. needed to "prevent an infusion of so-called inferior breeding stock to maintain its racial purity." There's lots of quotes  concerned about who was--and was not--fit to reproduce. 

Various groups tended to turn up as targets for eugenicists and French Canadians were among them. (You see them mentioned in writing about Vermont's eugenics survey.) Grant said of them "The Quebec Frenchmen will succeed in seriously impeding the progress of Canada and will succeed even better in keeping themselves a poor and ignorant community of little more importance to the world at large than are the Negroes in the South." (Hitting two groups at once!) Vermette says that Grant classified Canadiens as "the lowest form of whiteness in his racial scheme."

During this period, the issue of whether or not French Canadians are mixed race came up again. Vermette says that genealogists today are divided on how much early French and Native American marriage actually occurred, but it was a common believe in the U.S. in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and that was a reason for considering Franco-Americans nonwhite and thus inferior. (Another case of hitting two groups at once.)

Vermette gives the Vermont Eugenics Project its own section in his eugenics chapter. He quotes a letter to Dr. Henry F. Perkins, the head of the Vermont project, from Charles Benedict Davenport the creator of the Eugenics Record Office. "Did you know, that in the study of defects found in drafted men, Vermont stood at or near the top of the list...? This result I ascribe to the French Canadian constituents of the population which, I had other reasons for believing, to contain an undue proportion of defectives."

One of the interesting aspects, yes, there is more than one, of the eugenics movement is that terms like "defective" do not appear to have ever been defined. Another interesting aspect? It was a Progressive reform.

Vermont's Eugenics Project particularly targeted the poor, the disabled, French Canadians, and Native Americans. Two hundred and fifty-three sterilizations were performed there between 1931 and 1957.  You can also find a breakdown of sterilizations due to eugenics by state.

Eugenics Today? Positive vs Negative Eugenics

Now, there were two aspects to the eugenics movement:

The one sometimes referred to as negative, involved forced sterilizations of people considered unfit to reproduce. Negative eugenics gets a lot of attention for very obvious reasons. In addition to the unpleasantness going on in this country, books on eugenics by American writers were cited by Hitler and his buddies as influences. (Vermette and others.) Hitler...his buddies...the Holocaust.

This past spring, the word "eugenics" turned up in the press in response to some comments from a government leader on the topic of neurodivergence. 

But while the positive aspect of eugenics isn't, shall we say, as dark, it is...impactful. Positive eugenics encourages the improvement of humanity through selective breeding by actually encouraging breeding, but of the right sort of people. We're talking white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant, or at least western European. In A Distinct Alien Race, Vermette quotes someone who made a distinction between European French and French Canadian, for instance. No one was encouraging French Canadians to reproduce. The French they were more open to. 

An argument can be made that today's pronatalist (probirth movement) may have a positive eugenics tone to it, one involving large white families. Some pronatalists also have a goal of producing lots of children with high IQ. I say may, because it's difficult to speculate about how wide-spread a goal is when the same couple is featured in articles about it.

To Recap

A Distinct Alien Race is an excellent, well-documented history of a group that has seemed invisible to me most of my life, even though I'm a member of it. At one point the author, David Vermette, describes Franco-Americans as "a mostly forgotten, white-identified ethnic enclave in New England." 

It seems bizarre to me that that could happen to a people who were despised as much as Franco-Americans were one hundred plus years ago. However, history tells us that there are far worse things that can happen to a culture.

Comptez votre bénédictions.