Below you’ll find said review. Enjoy.

Wife of the Gods is the first in a series of mystery novels set in Ghana. A young aids worker is murdered in a small town and our protagonist, Detective Darko Dawson, is called in from the big city (Accra) to investigate.  A textbook execution of the mystery genre ensues.

Det. Dawson makes for an interesting protagonist. One has to be clever to make it to Detective in the CID, but Det. Dawson is also incredibly stubborn and that dogged refusal to abandon the impossible proves useful. Anger issues, a fondness for marijuana and an ill son cloud his motives and actions enough to keep him from dissolving into the stock sleuth. It also doesn’t hurt that Det. Dawson has a personal and tragic history in Ketanu, the location of the murder.

The writing is good too. The story moves at a rapid clip and yet the prose can be deliciously languid at times. Here the author describes a forest.

“The trees, covered from apex to root with dry, sloughing scales, beckoned him with their crackling, stunted branches.

…or describing cocoa pods

“Each was perfectly almond shaped with sculptured ridges that ended in a point like an erect nipple.”

Mystery fans will be well pleased by the author’s adherence to the guidelines of the genre. A discerning eye can easily (perhaps too easily) see the mechanics of mystery at play, suspects (obvious now and not so obvious later), alibis (solid and shaky in turns) and so on. The unraveling of events, the procedures, the characters, they’re all familiar and if that makes them less likely to surprise, it also makes them less likely to offend.

What separates Wife of the Gods from ten thousand or mysteries is the setting. There aren’t many mysteries set in Ghana (or any African nations for that matter, No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency being the most popular of these). The author makes full use of the inhabitants, environs and neurosis of this setting.

Witchcraft, ancient customs such as giving local priests young women to fulfill all their needs (the wives of the gods/trokosi), the fetishization of the dead/funeral customs; the author explores all these capably and weaves them into the story without obvious judgment.  Combined with the more literal characteristics of the setting, these issues provide a fresh backdrop to a familiar story.

It’s particularly interesting when African authors living in the west write about Africa. A special set of fears and biases plagues this group. At every step in the writing, we are beset by blind spots and propelled by advantages. We are always weighing the scales to see how much of Africa we can bear for the West, how heavy our obligation is to show the truth, if we can really see it clearly from over here. Strangely enough, one of the great charms of this novel is the absence of such a debate. There are echoes, a missing detail here, an extra detail there, but for the most part, its presentation of Ghana is self-assured.

I didn’t love Wife of the Gods, but I liked it well enough and I think you will too.

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Perhaps the most frustrating thing about Nigeria is that one can see its potential lying there beneath all its flaws. The possibility of a better place and a better people sharpens the pain of the present.  In many ways, Nnedi Okorafor’s Who Fears Death presents a similarly painful duality.

Like its protagonist, Who Fears Death is a mixture of many things: science fiction, the classic bildungsroman, dystopian fiction + feminist fiction and fantasy. It is the tale of Oyesonwu, a young sorceress who is a conceived when a light skinned man from an oppressive tribe, the Nuru, rapes her dark skinned mother who is from the oppressed tribe of Okeke. The novel tracks Oyesonwu as she comes into her magical powers, gather’s companions and sets off to destroy her father/rapist and end the oppression. The plot can easily be summed up as: village life (Things Fall Apart) + coming of age and power (Harry Potter) + fantasy quest (LOTR).

The author lays a story of greater dimensions on this simple foundation and explores a staggering range of issues.

There’s the aforementioned rape, which is much worse than it sounds because it is a weapon, a tactic used by the Nuru to impregnate Okeke women with lighter skinned children and so destroy their families and communities. The author does not shy away from these events and readers unfamiliar with the horror of rape will find themselves confronted with its details.

Oyesonwu is one of these biracial offspring, an Ewu. Through her, the author explores all the emotional trauma that comes with belonging to many and no places at the same time. It is this profound loneliness that leads Oyesonwu to Mwita, the Ewu man who eventually become her companion.

In what may be the best written section of the novel, Oyesonwu and three girls gets their clitorises cut off at the age of eleven. It is a crushing rendering of the confusion, pain and long-lasting damage caused by female circumcision. The author confronts the details and practicalities- what to do with the knife, what to wear home after, the reasons and emotions, the traditions that force such horrors upon children. Very well done.

The author has an impressive eye for physical and emotional detail, a talent for capturing spiritual movement and energy in concrete ideas readers can understand. Here she describes one of Oyesonwu’s transformations:

 ”When I’d changed into a mouse my dominant emotion was fear. Fear of being crushed, eaten, found, starving. When I changed back, the residual paranoia was so strong that I couldn’t leave my room for hours.”

and here after showing (through sorcery) her townspeople the happenings in a distant town:

“I pulled in the vision as one folds up a map.

There are gems in other places. When the protagonist and her companions come across a town in the throes of violence, they try to stop it and Oyesonwu:

“knocks men off women, their penises still erect and slick with blood and wetness.”

and

“Leaving this body will be easy, she’d always loved travelling.”

Meta-victories abound. Africa has a specific and ancient relationship with sorcery/witchcraft/juju. This relationship persists today despite serious efforts (by Africans themselves who are mostly now devoutly Christian or Muslim) to leave that portion of history behind. Accusations of witchcraft still hold serious consequences for the accused including physical harm and expulsion from communities. It is a victory of sorts to make readers who have a strong reflexive distaste for witchcraft (include evangelicals) sympathize with Oyesonwu.

By the end of Who Fears Death, the author has explored horrifying or controversial issues such as weaponized rape, tribalism, racism, female circumcision, pedophilia, motherhood, patriarchy, genocide, mankind’s potential for self destruction, gender roles and so on. A coherent, insightful and well written novel containing all these issues, the fantasy arc and a dystopian vision of Africa would be a marvelous thing indeed, a work of genius even. But this is not that novel. Its imperfections are too strong and woven in too deeply among its strengths. We see the potential but it is unfulfilled.

The prose is mostly awful. Who Fears Death is a frame story and Oyesonwu narrates the entire story (to someone who records the details). Significant portions of the story read as if the writer was taking dictation while someone else told a story, complete with all the authorial intrusions. While very authentic to the story structure (someone is telling a story), we don’t read the same way we hear and the words and sentences seem less to flow across the page than to fall down a stairway. Of the recognition of love, the author writes:

“…, but in this moment we realized we were in love. The realization was like flipping the power on.”

and here an aside, after which the story slows down considerably.

“Dare I say that just after the Rain Festival, when I returned to Aro’s hut, the rest of my story, though it spans over four years, begins to move very fast.”

and this:

“THE PAIN OF STONES AND RAGE FOR WHAT I had yet to do threatened to pull me underground.”

Writers from oral cultures face interesting dilemmas when they try to capture the casual intricacy of oral storytelling in prose. This requires some translation, a process that usually involves losing some of the rhythm of the spoken word in exchange for a smoother reading experience. The author appears to have skipped this translation in favor of authenticity (“On top of all of this, at eleven I still had hopes”). It was the wrong choice in this case.

There are other craft failures. Very little is shown, everything is told and even when something is shown, it is still told. (“I was sad…I was angry…I gnashed my teeth. I was angry.” ) The pacing can be problematic; the final confrontation which the 300 prior pages build up to is quick and ineffectual.  Coincidence and prophecies are deployed for maximum but ultimately unbelievable effect.  There is a great temptation to ignore these failures, after all we’re talking about rape, and female circumcision and genocide, we can’t expect the writing to be perfect. But the cumulative effect of these small missteps serves to distract and irritate.

Also: The word “intercourse” is used to describe sex countless in the story and it is incredibly grating. I think it’s fair to say that the “intercourse” will never be an evocative, accurate or even cool way to describe the act, not even in post-apocalyptic way. Authors would do well to think of alternatives that do not evoke ships scraping through a dry Suez Canal.

Complex, controversial issues are mixed blessings. The novel deserves praise for managing to fit so many in but it would have benefited from authorial restraint. Very early in the story, a reader learns that this will be an “issues” book, not because the author is preachy or to brazen in the handling of the issues (only occasionally with dialogue), but because the sheer number of issues requires the story to pivot and turn to engage each new one. The reader can see these turns and it can be tiring.

And then there is the penis question. The author sometimes paints too broad strokes of men as rapists, murderers, sexually aggressive morons:

“I also had to deal with stupid leering and grabbing by both men and boys”,

and

“All the filth those men had heaped on me with their filthy actions and filthy words and filthy ideas, none of it mattered now. Mwita, Mwita, Mwita.”

child abusers:

“In the market, men had tried to grab me”…”All this confused my six-year old mind.”

avenged oppressors

“Every single male human capable of impregnating a woman was dead”.

This does reflect reality in many ways, men are the major perpetrators of crimes against women. Still, one never hears of the Nazi men, Hutu men, Janjaweed men or American men. In these cases of genocide and racism, the (mostly male) perpetrator’s actions are greater than their gender; they come to represent the ideology of ALL their people. But in who fears death, the Nuru and Okeke men are distinctly terrible, separate from their society’s psychosis. While reading, I thought:

1. Are there sympathies, insights and understandings in this story that a woman would be more receptive to than I am? This could either mean that I’m an asshole or the text relies too heavily on gender context and doesn’t do enough to make them available to men.
2. If these sympathies insights and understandings do exist, I desperately want to partake of them. I want to receive the full richness in all fiction and this particular fiction, despite my gender.
3. As a reader of a novel that explores these issues, can I expect the text to make them available despite my gender? Isn’t it a writer’s duty to show us more than what we would normally see?
4. I need to read more feminist fiction. Is castration (mentioned by multiple characters in this story) and a cutting down of men to their correct ape-like level necessary for the uplifting of women?

The mystical elements – sorcery, magic, juju – blend in with the themes and issues in rather interesting ways. But those same mystical elements also weaken the themes and issues. The effects of female circumcision are healed by magic. Too many significant characters turn out to be sorcerers and this clouds the motivations for their actions with respect to the themes and issues.  It turns for example, that Oyesonwu’s father, the dark lord/rapist, specifically raped her mother in order for her to conceive a sorcerer. This revelation ruins the more nuanced exploration of weaponized rape that came in the pages before.

Who Fears Death has been well praised – PW Best Book of 2010, Nebula Award Nominee  and Tiptree Honor Book –  and while I find significant problems with the text (and wonder at how few of the reviews bring up these problems), I believe the praise is well deserved.The author’s bravery and ambition are impressive and remain undiminished by the final result.  Few books elicit a strong reaction from readers, most books that do cause a reaction, cause either strongly positive or negative ones. Who Fears Death unleashes a conflicting conflagration of emotions and ideas, positive and negative, and lasting. Like Nigeria, it is to be loved, to be disliked and to be thought of constantly.

Read this book.

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This is what I realize at four in the morning. I’ve been staring into the gloom of my bedroom ceiling for five hours, trying to remember who I used to be. Son, brother, cousin, Christian, Nigerian; none of these ring true. Only “writer” makes sense anymore, and even that only makes sense in the way Glenn Beck’s rants make sense; epiphany through mule-like belief.

In a way this is freedom. What is it to be a Christian but to fold ones ungainly self into the neat cube religion dictates? Who is a son if not the embodiment of his father’s hopes, fears and regrets?  And if one is not Nigerian, one has nothing to do with the 140, 000,000 resilient and fun loving scammers who are curiously prone to religious violence.

My gut knows better.

I miss them all; my folks and family. I miss my faith and my fucked up country. I may be free now, but it feels like I’m riding a camel across a tightrope. Bassey Ikpi’s poem recites itself in my head. I decide to visit Nigeria before the year is out, December  maybe. I am homeward bound and already I can see it as it will be.

My father is waiting at the airport. He smiles when I prostrate to greet him and when I get back to my feet, he will hold me close and say “God bless you, son.” My little brother and sister have grown again, like tall tales on each retelling. I greet their mother and she hugs me and slaps my back affectionately.

Outside, the Harmattan wind shoulders its way into my nostrils and mouth, dumps the cool dust it carried all the way from the Sahara into my lungs. The hawkers and touts are waiting too, they jostle and call out their wares with hand signals, it is open outcry at its finest. Any one of them would have ruled the Pit at the NYSE in the days when men still controlled the trading.

I sleep terribly for a few days. When I am awake, I gorge myself on Jollof rice, roll pounded yam, eba and amala into perfect balls before dipping them into stews. I crunch chin-chin until my jaws ache, send out my little brother for Okin biscuit and cubes of Choco Milo.

I am not satisfied.

Even though this is Abuja and not Lagos, I am terribly careful whenever i go out into the city. My fists are one finger away from clenched and my brain issues threat assessments for every man, woman and child I encounter. I dress in my worst clothes, wear my scruffiest shoes. Everyone still knows I have “just returned from abroad.” It is something in the eyes.

The paranoia passes after a few days.

My father and I talk. It is man to man, for most of the time. We disagree and he becomes a knowing father and I, a naive son. Maybe we don’t disagree. I tell him how scared I am. He opens his Bible and shows me God’s promises. Right then, I want him to be my father and not my pastor, but I know he loves me. There is never any doubt about that.

I don’t recall seeing a violin until I was near twenty years old. My little sister plays now, and she is bloody good. She plays for me. She calls me names, steals my novels to read and shrugs when I tell her to do something. Her English is better than mine and she doesn’t speak much Yoruba. I worry she is too bratty little sister, too Western (oh the irony). I remember how many pairs of my glasses she broke as a toddler. I am missing her young adulthood.

In the back of an old wagon now, a long distance taxi. Fellow travelers and I crash into its metal skeleton as the driver power slides around potholes. I grin like a fool the entire time. Several hours and several States later, I stand before my mother’s house. She is as thin and beautiful as I remember and I sweep her up. I want her to sit and talk to me, but she is at the stove, she insisting I eat. Don’t I want some of my mother’s cooking? And how come I didn’t tuck in my shirt? I’ve missed her cooking, it doesn’t taste the same.

No matter how long it’s been since I called her or she called me, I am still her overgrown son and she loves me. There is never any doubt about that. But she drives me crazy and she makes me sad and even though I haven’t seen her in several years, only two days pass before I’m in another wagon heading back the way I came.

My little brother blushes when I ask him about his girlfriends. He plays the Saxophone, and I pester him for lessons, but he wants to play video games or run around on those shoes with wheels in their soles. Only when I tell him I want to learn the Sax to wow my girlfriends does he relent. While he shows me where to place my fingers, I will think of the time all those years ago when he somehow managed to pee in his eyes and we laughed until we cried.

At church on Sunday, I sing and clap and dance until I am sticky with sweat. I mumble when everyone begins to pray in tongues. In my head, I ask God to help me believe in him again. While the Pastor begins to preach about breakthroughs, I wonder why it’s always about breakthroughs and contracts and promotions and want. Why is it never about love or redemption? The service takes too long and I fall asleep a few times. I do not believe.

My big brother is the best man I know. I wish we saw each other more.

We travel to my father’s village. If the mood strikes, we sing songs from The Sound of Music on the way. Maybe we sing hymns instead. My grandmother is slowing down now. Everyone calls her Mama Bessi, but her name is Elizabeth. I’ve never had a full adult conversation with her. I don’t speak Iyagba, my mother tongue.  She asks how I am, I ask how she is.We snap pictures. Her efo oniru is still the best I’ve ever had.

My father introduces me to several suitable lasses in the hopes I’ll marry one of them. I don’t have the heart to tell him the odds are slim, that if I ever marry, she might very well be the furthest from these women, say a half Japanese, half Norwegian basketball player.

Back in Abuja, there will be a trip to the embassy to get a stamp in my passport. It will be stressful and there will be, as always, a good chance I am denied.

I think of Lagos. I’ve been writing a novel about Her – the City – for four years now.  Her smell lingers in my nose hairs. Open gutters, grilled maize, Boli, street trash, frying meat, sweat, cheap perfume and exhaust smoke; sauteed together. The orchestral din of Her traffic rings in my ears in every moment. She doesn’t like it when I talk like this, all sentimental. She is impervious to my sentiment, to me. I never forget how easy it is for her to fuck me (or anyone really) up. I should go to her. I don’t.

Uncles, aunts, cousins, nieces, nephews, family friends, school friends. I see as many as I can. Hand out the small gifts that are really apologies for the intimacy we once shared. We used to talk about anything. We ran round your father’s house shooting lizards with our catapults. We once slept side by side underneath a wicked senior’s bed in school. We were more than this and I am sorry.

The day comes. Packed food. Souvenirs for friends. Airport. Goodbye. Long Flight. Immigration. Back in the US of A. I am secretly glad.

Now, I am better than myself. I do not complain about work. I do not complain about money. I do not complain about writing. I do not complain. I am lucky. For a while. Then I am my feeble, scared self again. Unsure, insecure, unmoored. I am awake at four in the morning, staring into the gloom of my bedroom ceiling wondering who I used to be.

I am homesick.

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Yours truly just returned from a week at the Squaw Valley Community of Writers. It may very well have been one of the best weeks of my life, certainly of my writing life.

If there’s a dominant emotion among the maelstrom of feelings the Community stirs up, it is Gratitude. I can’t say thank you enough to the Hall family, all the staff and the participants. I learned so much about the craft this week, got to read amazing work by published and unpublished writers. I now see more of what is possible.

I am just as grateful for the sense of tradition and belonging at the Community. None of the many wonderful moments would exist if the founders of the Community had not believed in what we do as writers. In the 42 years since, their families, friends, staff and participants have continued to believe. I believe.

Also, it was just fucking cool to meet and learn from Janet Fitch, Dagoberto Gilb, Amy Tan, Leslie Daniels, Lynn Freed, Elise Blackwell, Mark Childress and many other writers, agents and editors. Best of all, I got to hang out with some young (in career) writers you don’t know yet (but you will, I promise), writers who are right now slogging through the beautiful mud of creation. They will be soon be ready and they will amaze you.

I finished a new draft of my novel two weeks ago. I thought it was finished but after everything I learned at the Community of Writers this past week, I know it can be even better. I am going to write another draft. I am not afraid.

If you ever get a chance to attend the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, you do so.

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2. The Consummate Blogger and the Consumed Writer: A Reevaluation.
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I am greedy. When it comes to art and its many forms, I always want more.

There’s my penchant for Sanjay L. Bhansali movies. SLB is a Bollywood director who makes sentimental movies with cinematography so excessively lush, “an orgy for the eyes” becomes an understatement. Every scene in a Bhansali movie is hyper realized, the light is always as it would be in a perfect sky, skirts billow as they would in a perfect breeze, color is pornographic in intensity. One laments not watching these movies in equally decadent surroundings, say sitting on a bed of warm breasts while being fed slices of panda kidney.

This, it turns out, is also how I like my prose. Lush, lavish, lyrical and unashamedly seductive.  Metaphors coiling about metaphors coiling until my chest is tight and I have no choice but to succumb to the dream. And if Bhansali has a literary equal when it comes to seduction by sensory overload, it is most definitely Arundhati Roy (what is it about India?), author of one my favorite books, The God of Small Things.

A side effect of seduction by sensory overload is length. It takes time to seduce in this manner, every sense must be attended, slowly stolen from reality until the real world is lulled into slumber and the story world takes over.

It’s no surprise that I’ve never watched a short film or read a pure collection of short stories (David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas being a bastard child of both the short and long forms).

I bring up all this to illustrate how different from my taste and experience Davin Malasarn’s collection of shorts, The Wild Grass and Other Stories, truly is.

There’s the writing; which is remarkable for its grace and lightness.  Prose moves across the page with the grace and precision of a ballerina. She leaps -the petite jete - she lands and at the spot where her feet touch the stage, a word appears on the page. She leaps and lands. Another word on the page and so on.  One reads a word and then the next and the next, and each is liberating.

One of the stories in the collection, The Center of Attention, is about a TV crew filming a small child (Elliot)grown large for his age, we sense unknown trauma when the unwilling mother leads the child away into her bedroom and begs the crew to leave. They need twenty more minutes of footage. The author writes.

“She stepped back and the crew went into the bedroom. They tried to open the door but Elliot was pushing hard from the other side to keep it closed.

‘Let them in please, Elliot,’ Molly said.

The boy continued to push against the door, and for a moment Molly prayed for the giant inside him.”

The last sentence in the excerpt above (which is also the last sentence of the story) is painful in its precision.  No images, allusion or connections interfere with the clarity gained in that last phrase. It is a feat heavy prose finds difficult to achieve.

In no way does the lightness of the prose preclude the proper expression of what makes us human. The author has an uncanny ability to take little moments and to spread them across the expanse of a lifetime. We see these moments, and we know that while they are single points in time, they are also stand ins for many other moments of equal joy, surprise, sorrow and helplessness.

Speaking of helplessness, the first story in the collection, The Burning Girl, filled me with a sense of unease and helpless horror that come pouring back each time I read it. The story is about a child undergoing a bizarre Buddhist ritual and it underscores on of the many strengths of the collection, variety. The stories veer from Buddhist rituals to small villages in Thailand to mines in Brazil to magic realist law firm in Manhattan. Characters range from small children to those nearly in the next world. The collection feels large and welcoming as a result.

Dolores is by far my favorite story in the collection. In it, the author captures the poignancy and harshness of young love. How strange and wonderful it can be and how easily the tides of life can sweep it away. The author writes in second person, and it is very very well done. He writes.

“With her hand held in your trembling hand, you will go down on one knew as if you were about to propose, but instead you will only be able to apologize, head down and crying, hating yourself for reasons you don’t understand.”

Many of the stories in the collection are just three pages long and the whole collection is just 91 pages. This length works for the lightness of the prose and the tight focus of the stories. If seduction by sensory overload creates insight and feeling — builds the house of meaning so to speak — by the accumulation of connections and images, Mr. Malasarn’s prose builds the same house through the avoidance of all those very things so that only what is essential remains.

The insight or clarity gained at the end of a few of the stories fade quickly from the mind, most likely because they fail to achieve the necessary weight and import to sink slowly through ones thoughts. At times, I finished one or two stories thinking they were very good but then couldn’t remember what they were about the two stories later. Now this may very well be a symptom of the short story form which means I lay an unfair burden on the collection’s shoulders.

The collection is self-published but you’d never be able to tell by looking at it. The cover is excellent, with a very classic feel and images that tie in neatly with the stories. The copyediting is also top notch and I noticed a single typo in the whole collection. Formatting was as good as I’ve seen on any other eBook. Self-published authors would do good to pay attention to Mr. Malasarn’s production efforts on this novel. No less is acceptable.

“I don’t have to be greedy. The house of meaning can be built in many ways. This moment is but a stand in for countless others. The kiss, the cut of the epiphany are not far away. Girls called Dolores are always…”

These are but a few of the lessons I take from this collection both as a reader and a writer. Mr. Malasarn has compressed many moments, many thoughts, many lifetimes into The Wild Grass and Other Stories. Read it and disfcover what you will within.

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Yes, the title of this post creeps us out too, it really does. What can we say? Craigslist personals have nothing on us…we will outcreep anyone, anywhere! Below,  a short missive from our time in the (very active) bowels of our manuscript.

An Interrogation

Sit down. In the hard chair behind the scarred table. The room is darker than Sarah Palin’s neural pathways. Here we come, jackbooted. Thrusting industrial strength lamps in your gentle face. Slamming gloved fists on the table. You’re going to answer all our questions… or else. There is no good cop/bad cop here, just us and an IRS agent out back to audit the shit out of you if you resist. You will tell us the truth or we will have your library cards and tax deductions ground to dust…now answer:

How are you? How goes the business of living, the daily fight against the inertia of existence? How fares reading and writing? Work? Lovers? Family? Everything and everyone else?

We hope it all goes well and you are beyond excellent. We miss you tremendously and it is all we can do not to abandon our children manuscript and spend all day visiting your blogs and making smart comments to and with you on the Twitter. We can’t wait until we can get back to learning from you daily.

How Are We?

We’re good…sexy as eva! Apparently we are still unable to understand the meaning of seriousness, gravitas and adulthood (the WSJ may have based this piece on us). We mean it about being sexy though, our Fro would make Leon Phelps (of Ladies Man fame) and Samson (of biblical fame) proud and we are as buff as a mostly stationary cubicle worker can be.

At the urging of our employer, we  moved to the west side of this great nation, specifically to sunny California where it has rained for 17 of the thirty five days we have been here. We promise that the next time we move 2600 miles, it will be for the love of a woman and not for work.  In pursuit of this glorious love, We have established a renaissance man cave and made its location known to all the lasses in the surrounding areas. In between their visits, we write.

And The Manuscript

Ah yes, the manuscript or as we call it, the first slave ship to sail down the River Niger. On most days we are convinced that it is so good, it will make you touch yourself (or others in your vicinity) with joyous glee. There are those other days when we are convinced we should have taken those Saxophone lessons instead of starting a bloody novel.

On the whole though, we think our updates have made a world of difference and we thank our gracious editor (Paula B) tremendously.  We believe the whole shebang will be ready to win us a bevy of adoring fans in a few months.

We’ve  been wrong before…many times actually. That’s where you come in.

In Need of Beta

We are obviously in love with our self and talent (witness the untrue plurality of our pov in this post) and as such we are in need of one or two discerning readers to tell us where to stuff our shitty manuscript (we are hoping for more specific feedback).

Our humble novel tells the story of a  love triangle between two people and a place. Funmi loves Nigeria and wants to help it blossom. Dayo loves her but hates Nigeria and wants nothing more than to leave it behind. Nigeria doesn’t give a damn either way. Tharr you have the ethereal gonads of the story.

Yes there’s plenty of “lush and evocative prose” but we are as invested in plot as we are in language. We seek to entertain you as much as we aim to show you some truth of the human condition.  Despite the tone of this post, we take this here endeavor here as seriously as one can (we didn’t make fun of Sarah Palin once in the entire manuscript) and we promise to be on our very best and professional behavior.

So this is our plea. Be our devil’s advocate, be our devil. Tell us when we are scratching some literary itch on the page, or when we sacrifice insight for the sake of hastening your heartbeat.  Give us your first, middle and anytime you bloody want impressions. Save us from ourselves, save other readers from us.

Given that we’re just a tad shy, we’d like volunteers to be folks we are familiar with from the blogosphere and twitter (or Craigslist personals). We would start off with one or two chapters and proceed if you are interested in doing so. Given that we are members of the unwashed unpublished masses, we can afford no payment other than the great sea of our gratitude (and the opportunity to participate in the labor and pleasure of creation).

Please let us know if you’re a writer and you’d like us to have a looksee at your work in return, we’d love to.

What say you?

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3. Literary Fiction Bashing: Enough is Enough

Here’s the link: Pens With Cojones on Indie Literature.

Enjoy.

Ps: Make sure to have a looksee around Wanda’s wonderful site.

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Obey Giant by Shepard Fairey

Chills scamper down my spine every time I see a video of Allen Ginsberg chanting (rather terribly) to calm a large crowd of restless protesters and policemen at the (frequently violent) 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. I feel the same awe when I read about Liu Xiabobo challenging Confucianism in China long before he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010.  The same gratitude for Wole Soyinka’s perseverance in the fight for a better Nigeria, for Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s exposure of Soviet labor camps, Ninotchka Rosca’s attacks on gender exploitation and the oppression of women, the nine Vietnamese writers jailed for their pro-democracy efforts.

A Dissident Vocation

I have always believed in the ability of Dissent to keep us from the ecstatic doom of popular thought and emotion, in its power to bludgeon us closer to perfection. And if I have believed in Dissent, I have believed even more fiercely in Dissent as the natural state and responsibility of writers.

If a people succumb to lusts unbalanced by love: the romance of war, obsessive accumulation of wealth, celebration of stupidity, excessive love of self, corruption,  ceaseless consumption and so on, it is because the writers among that people are silent, unmoving and polite. It is as Mario Vargas Llosa said in his Noble Prize acceptance speech:

“”We would be worse than we are without the good books we have read, more conformist, not as restless, more submissive, and the critical spirit, the engine of progress, would not even exist. Like writing, reading is a protest against the insufficiencies of life.”

It is our responsibility as writers to be non-conformist, restless, suspicious of common knowledge, distrustful of authority, paranoid and perennially dis-satisfied. To be writers is to reject the cliches in every facet of society and our lives,  to search, fight, feel and listen our way to the truth we make known in our fiction. This is how we make things better, by refusing to accept the way they are now.

“A certain kind of intelligence may be nothing more or less than a superior capacity for dissatisfaction”   –  Alaine de Botton

Dissent is necessary. We are all failures

Good Little Writers

Quick! To the nearest Top Ten list of best books of 2010. Find ye any dissent?  Gorgeous prose? Yes! Innovative structures? Yes! Explorations of the middle class psyche? Yes!  Postmortems of lifeless marriages? Yes! Gloriously charming child narrators? Windows into immigrant life? Yes! Dissent? Dissent? Dissent?

We-this new generation of writers are a quivering, saluting sea of limp penises.  In a time of two wars, of  heated and frequently violent ideological debate, ubiquitous corporate power, terrorism, crazed shootings, obscene materialism, increasing income inequality, constant surveillance and exponential stupidity,is there nothing we can fight for?

This is not another lament over the great decline of literature (okay, maybe a little). It is a lament at the great decline of dissident writers, writers who live unashamed in and unafraid of the public eye and against public tides.  This is a protest against our abdication of our dissident roles in public discourse, a rejection of our Charles Barkley “I am not a Role Model” attitude.

We do not Howl for anything, we do not fight for anything, we march in no picket lines, we refuse no handouts, we make no demands, we avoid all arguments (don’t you dare mention Franzenfreude), we embrace all corporations, take what we are given and yessuh along with it, race en mass to the hottest new product, buy, buy, buy,  be polite, inoffensive and normal.

This is a protest of the culture that leads a young writer to ask Ron Hogan on Publishing QT if authors should have negative opinions. The question (and the response) boggles the mind. To that writer I say:

“Yes dammit! You’re a writer, have any opinion you want, have sex in times square, call the Pope a moron, call for thrice weekly church services, vote Palin for Prez, chant “publishing sucks” before bedtime, marry Markus Dohle, protest the wars, buy flak jackets for the troops, call out fellow literary writers for being boring blowhards, piss of the genre army. Have a bloody opinion, and not just because it’s cool or profitable, but because you’re alive.”

The spirit of dissent is more alive in a brace of street artists than in our whole lot. More distrust in cypher of conscious rappers than at entire literary festivals. Money invades even these spheres in the end, but writers are so far gone, so attached to the rich, gentlemanly tit of our establishment that it’ll take a miracle to set us free again. We have no underground, no other ground to grow writers and books free of conformist influences.

Where is our Beat generation, our Nouveaux Philosophes, our Bloc 8406? And maybe we’re not as far out as these forebears, I would have been a stuffed shirt amidst the free love and delinquency of the beats and a dumbass among the New Philosphers…but their spirit of dissent was and remains necessary.

Within the Hive

We are not so bad at Dissent in our little corner of the blogosphere. Look at all those top ten lists and anti lists eh? The silly Franzenfreude, whitewashing outrage, propriety rage at the pedophilia book, to Nanowrimo or not to Nanowrimo, plagiarism kerfuffles and the like. The clang and clamor of sparring opinions ring loudly and clearly on Twitter, blogs and the book review sections of the big papers. But this is all within our hive, hidden and irrelevant to the tens of millions of readers who don’t read book blogs, literary mags or follow publishing related tweeps with the obsession of Bieber fans.

And we wonder (in anecdotal fashion) why people aren’t reading anymore.

Outside these walls, in the real America (oh Sarah!), we are cardboard characters, flatter than a EEG graph measuring Mrs. Palin’s brain activity. Literary and genre superstars write their books on cue, publish them on cue, market them on cue, start over again in a remarkable mimicry of a production line.  All of the creativity and mischief we possess and show in our little world mean nothing if the much much larger world out there doesn’t see or isn’t affected by it. This little light of ours, we’ve got to let it shine…like a mutha.

Self Publishers: The Shackled Free

Can you hear the bells? The harmonious singing of literary angels? A voice in the wilderness crying  ”Freedom is coming?” The writers have been set free, they can self publish now, escape the tyranny (and excellent distribution) of traditional publishing.

Yet when writers today decide to free themselves of whatever constraints (like entry) traditional publishing may put on us, do we write what cannot be written in the traditional world, do we speak hushed truths? Do we embrace fully the freedom we now posses? Nosiree! It’s the same fecal subject matter over and over again. Books as conformist and mindless as toilet paper.  The same obsession with production, copies sold, amazon rankings, twitter followers, apps, making money.

More than ever, we are free to write the truth, to say what others will not. But we don’t, we like the feel of these shackles dammit, yes we do.

Dissent is Bad for Business and Pleasure

You will not share this post.

No one likes to be the bearer of bad news, least of all you.  I’m not just saying that, it’s science. You’re friendly and you don’t talk if you don’t have anything nice to say, just like your momma told you. You couldn’t possibly take any of this to heart, you might offend someone, piss of an editor or a crucial bloc of readers. The country is in a recession, people want good news, happy news, entertainment! This no time to make a fuss.

How is your agent supposed to sell your book to publishers if you’re bashing them all the time. Shit, how are you even supposed to land an agent if you’re a dissenter? They don’t like negative writers. No, you have to be quiet, you have to be trusting, you have to maintain the proper business climate…or else.

You will not share this post.  Or maybe you will.

But you’ll comment on the paranoia and suspicion you note lurking beneath my words (we both get cookies for job well done!). Maybe I’m bitter, you know that stuff eats writers inside. Maybe you’ll write a response and give me the Lee Siegel and B.R Meyers treatment, an evisceration for daring to question the glowing success and state of the literati. For the record, while this post may resemble a Lee Siegel or B.R Meyers piece on crack, I am different from those guys in that I am able and willing to kick you in the nuts.

In your response you will display how much better read and informed you are (all true to be honest, I am but a humble philistine). You will be far more rational than I am here because you are a better person than I am (which you are). You will call for optimism and unity because those are always nicer and better than dissent. The Lauren Conrad novel? “Tis a scratch” you’ll say. Snooki’s work of art? “It’s just a flesh wound.” Indeed.  However, if you’re feeling somewhat ballsy and mean, you’ll connect this mound of steaming rhetoric to the tragedy in Tucson somehow (everyone’s doing it).

Maybe you actually like this post.

But its so taxing to make a fuss now isn’t it? Life is hard enough, writing well is hard enough. Why kill yourself trying to be more than what you are? Bills to be paid, health issues, terrible bosses, love lives as barren as the Sahara; who has time for this guerrilla literature? You are not Banksy, Nas or Immortal Technique. You are a writer and writers are quiet people.

Dissent Begins at Home

Dissent – like charity- begins at home and fewer areas are more in need of dissent than writers’ relationships to their work and to the business of publishing. It is in this sphere that the pressure to be a good, little writer first emerges.  It is here that a writers less optimistic about publishing first get called “Negative Nancies” or “Debbie Downers” (with accompanying blog posts), phrases meant to bludgeon them into silence and shame.

Now, my personal reaction to these phrases is to tell the wielder  to stuff a rolled up galley up their you know whats, but that’s just me being an asshole. Let’s try for a more civil response eh?

The publishing supply and value chains are made of many parties including writers, agents, publishers, distributors, retailers,  device makers and so on. Each of these parties has varying amounts of power at different times. At all times, weaker parties clamor for a change in terms and complain about the balance of power. This dissident din helps to shape public perception and debate and can lead to real change.

This phenomenon is present at all steps of the publishing chains, publishers regularly badmouth and complain about Amazon, independent bookstores about large retailers and Amazon, small publishers about dominant distributors and the too close relationship between establishment media and the big publishers. It goes on and on depending on who’s got who by the balls.

Writers have every right to participate in this shaping of public perception. We have a right to argue for changes to terms or policies we do not find acceptable. We have the right to count every hour spent hard at work on our novels as business costs and weigh them against the compensation and treatment. Any attempts to deny this right, or to cast writers as pessimists is horseshit at best.

A quick note on literary agents who use the insulting phrases above.

“Writers might be served better looking elsewhere for representation, signing up with agents who tell their writers to shut up is very much like taking a pen knife to gunfight in Kandahar City”

Always get the facts before dissenting. Other than that…dissent away.

Moving Forward

Assuming you stuck around to the end of this self flagellation, and you’re not heavy with accumulated disgust, what are we going to do eh?

We already know we shouldn’t have any expectations of serious financial gain from our writing. We already know that the majority of us will languish in obscurity. And yet we persevere, we find new ways to survive in an increasingly tough climate. We write because we must.

If we could just fight that fight in the pursuit of something more. Something beyond sales, beyond cheap thrills, beyond living as naively as the audiences we are supposed to whisper truth to. If we could get to a place where we our value to society is not only as a haven from the increasingly vapidity and speed of our culture, but as an active source of truth they can find no where else.

We must inject ourselves into the people’s consciousness for good. We must see clearly everything that would destroy the good in our culture and we must fight those things in both our work and our lives. We must be unafraid in the face of the consequences that come with dissidnt. We must live fully in the true nature of our vocation.

Happy MLK day.

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[Update]: Ron pointed out the unfairness of me calling him out for his response without detailing that response. He’s right and I apologize. A little more on his response below.

Ron basically warned the writer of some of the consequences of having negative opinions that I wrote about in the post (offending fellow writers or readers etc.) That in itself is not a bad thing, it would be foolish to speak one’s mind without knowledge of the consequences (as opposed to despite the consequences). That particular exchange just seemed to typify the kind of encouragement or pressure writers get to be safe.

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2. Writing Weaknesses: Search and Destroy
3. Writing Honestly: The Case for Tortured Artists

———————————————

Tyler Durden changed my life the day he asked me: “How much can you know yourself if you’ve never been in a fight”?

The next day, I, the reader, the intellectual who never played sports and much less started trouble, joined a boxing club. Eight years later, I’m still boxing two to four times a week and I’m in the middle of writing my first novel. There’s a lot of help available out there for writers like me who are looking for a way to get published. From The Elements Of Style, to the latest blog about writing, you have a LOT of rules and opinions about the craft to choose from.

While I’ve read a lot of these books/sites/blogs, the best thing I ever did for my writing was to box a few rounds with a sparring partner. In boxing, like in fiction, a trainer can only get you so far. You can learn the rules and the basic aspects of the game. You can know the craft, but knowing the rules won’t make you good at it. You can know boxing without being a good boxer. When the gloves are laced and the bell rings, all boxers are left to themselves to learn the two most important aspects of the game: range and timing.

All the boxing greats developed a personal approach to those concepts. Mike Tyson stayed inside for the whole time and hit the body until his opponent gave up. Muhammad Ali kept a distance that allowed him to masterfully plot his attacks. Bernard Hopkins used his opponents timing against him. They all mastered range and timing and yet, their understanding of it couldn’t be any different.

There’s something to be learned here.

I doubt anyone of you reading this hits the word processor with thoughts of mediocrity. We all want to be the best at what we do. I want to be where Dennis Lehane is right now. You might want to be the next Tolstoy or the downfall of J.K Rowling, these ambitions are valid, but it’s up to you to live up to them.

What makes your favourite writer great cannot be learned in book or passed like the Secrets of Fatima. It’s a personal approach to the writer’s thoughts and production that created the necessary conditions for those novels that gave you the urge to write. They all know the rules and found ways to include them in their winning formula.

So do me a favour. Close those web sites where you’re reading for the hundredth time about how to avoid adverbs or the importance of a story arc. You know this, you’ve read about it before. Close your browsers and start thinking. My boxing trainer always tells me: “Don’t work hard, work smart. It’s capital to always remain smart about the game”.

Are you being smart about your book? When you start receiving form rejections (because you will, no matter how good you are), will you be one of those bitter unsung geniuses or will you be able to take a step back, jab away from the opposition and try to figure things out from there? Do you know yourself as a writer? Can you define your style and your approach to fiction without having to refer to the rules? Can you figure out an angle to will put you ahead of the competition?

Everyone who knows how to write can abide by the rules of fiction. Knowing them and abiding by them won’t save you from the form rejection. Only you can. Know your range; create the proper distance with your subject. Don’t listen to what you’ve being prescribed, but find what works for you. Know yourself and half the battle is won. I’ve read The Elements Of Style already. Now I want to read you.

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One of the greatest benefits of exploring the blogosphere is the opportunity to meet unique people. The connections we make are as varied in nature as a marathon session of ChatRoulette, with all the latter’s potential for shock, disgust and genuine connection.

That’s sort of how I met Bill Ectric. I’d noted and appreciated Bill’s comments on one of my favorite literary blogs, LitKicks and I stopped by his blog to say hello. Bill was kind enough to  send me a copy of his novel, Tamper which I read recently.

Tamper follows young protagonist Whit, his best friend Roger and a small cadre of friends from childhood in the 60′s to adulthood. Whit is sensitive and seeks the answers to many of life’s questions and experiences but that is where major resemblance to the classic bildungsroman end. Tamper’s true conceit is that Whit and his friends are obsessed with the paranormal, the fantastic and scientific, the occult and the unexplainable. The search for answers to these mysteries will lead Whit and co. through and to strange domes, abandoned churches, buried phones, military duty in Spain, drug induced psychosis, first loves,  and Malta’s ancient catacombs.

There are some things wrong with this novel…

The clarity and composition of the cover immediately reveal the book to be a self published one (which  is never a good thing). There were also enough spelling and grammar mistakes scattered around to make me take notice. More serious than these cosmetic issues is the nature of the prose itself, it suffers from a certain awkwardness that can be very jarring (note that I suffer from writerly reading and pay more attention to prose mechanics than the average reader). A sex scene in the latter half of the book made me laugh (“unrolled the rubber snugly over my receptive rod”) and I imagine that wasn’t the desired reaction.

These problems don’t matter in the big scheme of things…I like this book.

Tamper has so much going for it that readers will file away any deficiencies and keep right on reading and enjoying the book. With this novel, Bill Ectric demonstrates why “write what you know” is frequent writing advice. It soon becomes very clear to the reader that the author knows his shit when it comes to the the mysterious and esoteric (he’s being interested and involved in the area for many decades). The writing shines with all of Bill’s knowledge of the facts and that grounds the reader in what is a fantastic tale.

“Tamper was the word used by pulp fiction writer Richard Shaver, who sparked a controversy among the readers of the Amazing Stories Magazine in the 1940s when he claimed that an ancient civilization of underground mutants were tormenting his mind with invisible rays, ‘tampering’ with his brain.”

The above is not just a quote from the book, it’s fact. Richard Shave was a pulp fiction writer in the 40s and he did make those outrageous claims. Malta’s ancient catacombs (the Hypogeum) do exist and possess a very real reputation for being sources of numerous unexplained mysteries. When you find out that the author spent time in Spain (like Whit) you begin to wonder, how much is real and how much is imagined. Again and again, the fantastic is based in reality and the reality in no way diminishes the fantasy.

The author also knows his way around narrative structures and techniques. The story flashes forward and backwards, coiling about repeated themes crucial to Whit’s life.  It is all done smoothly and efficiently. Even when the author breaks into a stream of consciousness for a few pages at a crucial moment, the transitions in and out of the stream are seamless and the full impact of the moment is preserved.

And when the prose works, it really works. The word choice and structure in these moments really capture the paranormal, freeze the unknowable long enough for us to to see and wonder before it scurries away into the darkness. Here’s one passage that gave me the shakes in a very good way.

“An opulent white cloud, slowly roiling into a cylindrical formation, floated blimp-slow until it hovered directly over my house. Chills of dread gripped me when the white mass turned solid and cracked open lengthwise. Something dark slithered and pulsed inside until the fissure split wide open.”

Better than all these though, is the fact that Tamper is good fun. Whit and his friends have the sort of inquisitive innocence that made The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew so popular. Following these characters on their adventures gives one a nostalgic pleasure, a memory of how much we believed in our youth.  Whit learns much about himself and the world in the course of these adventures…this is a bildungsroman after all.

Take away all that is strange and weird about this book and the curious charm of the story still propels you along with ease. Tamper is not always as polished as one would like, but the compelling story, the author’s purity of intent, and the character’s childlike belief more than make up for it.

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