Hello.

After a brief update, I have for you a cover reveal for my upcoming novella 11 bookmarks (if you'd like an e-arc, reply to this email with your preferred file format), an experience that underlined the utility and frustration of various modes of reading, and a brief thought on the joys of reading minor works by major authors.

A few updates first:

• I really enjoyed 4th Street Fantasy this year. The panel on uncertainty and fiction I was on seemed to be well-received, and it was great seeing friends new and old, although, as always, I didn't get to talk to, let alone talk in-depth to, as many people as I had hoped.
• I'm now all caught up with Lois McMaster Bujold's Penric novellas and am now kicking myself that I didn't pace them out better. After a period away from them, I read books 12-16 within the space of five months. I want to write about them, but there's no way I can tackle the whole series, so I'm thinking that will need to come in the form of taking a close look at one of the novellas (or even just a scene or two or theme from one of them) but doing so in the context of the series.
• Much of my television watching of late has been mediocre, not super disappointing, but not recommendable either. However, I finally caught up with The Lowdown and even though didn't quite reach the heights of Reservation Dogs, it's still great and does what Sterlin Harjo does best: balance detailed character portraits with a look at a whole community while also hitting on broader, timely (often painfully so) themes and being firmly rooted in a sense of place (Tulsa in this case) and the American Indian experience while also delivering moments of strangeness, both hilarious and terrifying (and sometimes both at the same time).
• I asked on Bluesky about river novels a few months ago. The Bird of the River by Kage Baker is one of the recommendations I received, and it was a good one, an excellent illustration of why a river trip can work so well in a fantasty setting.
• I decided to re-engage with Volodine and read The Inner Harbour and The Monroe Girls in June and am gearing myself up to finally tackle Radiant Terminus. I don't think this is going to be a completist project for me, but I'm now at the point where he's got me in that I've become interested in how the variations of his central idea—all of his novels feature characters stuck in some sort of bardo/state between life and death—manifest.
• Finally: it's been good to see Silvia Park's Luminous getting some award nominations and reviews from the SF&F community. This Stewart Hotson review is going to do a better job than I can of convincing you to read it, but I'm going to say it one more time: it's a shame that Luminous* isn't in contention for a Hugo Award. It's truly core genre even though it was marketed more via Park's MFA credentials (and, to be sure, has beautiful prose and excellent characterization).

*hat tip to Renay's Intergalactic Mixtape for bringing this review to my attention.

Now on to the main features:

11 bookmarks cover

So that's the ebook cover (in the print version, the image continues on to the back cover). I created it by layering three photos—one of ice with leaves embedded in it, one of white streaks on a dark window, and one of concrete—and then messing with the transparency of the three photos until their sandwiching worked well together. I'm quite pleased with it, and have verified that it works in print form as well.

I've finished the on-paper proofread and am confident that I will be able to publish it in late September or early October. It's been interesting writing, editing, and publishing a book in the space of ten months. It's only possible because it's a short novella (the print version is 83 pages), I was able to write the first draft so quickly, and I'm self-publishing, but the momentum of it has been fun and interesting to experience.

I'm excited to tell you more about it in my next email.

On reading modes and 4th Street Fantasy and The American Vandal

I had an interesting experience while commuting to and from 4th Street this year. I live about thirty minutes away, and so I used my drives to and fro to catch up with episodes of the excellent podcast The American Vandal, and specifically, the June 19 episode "Reading, Sleep, Attention, Grief," which featured papers and responses on reading, attention, sleep, and dreaming from the Modes of Reading Today Symposium held last February at the Townsend Center for the Humanities.

The last day of 4th Street was also Father's Day, and I found myself to listening to the last part of the episode, which features a bonus section at the end where The American Vandal host Matt Seybold is interviewed about the work he's doing with the podcast and also about the death of his father, while driving home to have dinner with my family and in-laws and having not yet had a chance to talk to my father. It was a difficult, wonderful experience, my head already full of thoughts both from the podcast and the convention panels, to hear Seybold talk with such raw emotion about his father, and, in particular, a moment when his father sacrificed his career to stand up against injustice. I highly recommend listening to the episode (available in all podcast players: just search for The American Vandal), although if you're new to the podcast, maybe go back and listen to three or four or five other episodes from the past three years or so to understand what this podcast project has become.

There was another moment, though, that struck me. At around the one hour mark the discussion turns to immersiveness and reading, and Seybold shares an email he received from John Guillory (author of On Close Reading) and highlights a moment from it that he said "rattled" him, which is that Guillory reads (and re-reads) Trollope novels but reserves them as immersive reading experiences—he doesn't teach them or write about them. Seybold identifies that as a "eureka moment" in understanding what Guillory is talking about when he writes about immersive reading in On Close Reading. Seybold then adds, "and maybe what we need to be thinking about as ways of potentially defining professional reading, and, therefore, also close reading, right? That ability to escape the labor associated with interpretive work that we do is something that can be potentially cultivated and protected, and then, maybe, potentially is also complimentary to the kinds of reading we do for the purpose of writing, teaching, doing scholarship, and research."

The follow up discussion to this was fascinating to me. Especially, when Yael Segalovitz (shout out UC Berkeley comp lit!) both noted that Guillory's email to Seybold better helped her understand Guillory's notion of immersive reading (especially as a technique of the self) and expressed surprise that it's something he is capable of doing. She says (around the 1:25:00 mark): "But I don't think we can then decide, oh, at least for me, today I will not do it. Today, I will just immerse myself in the text and will not have that inner gaze. So I'm surprised and amazed that he is able to do it."

This surprised me for reasons that will become clear after I share the other thing, which is that, this discussion on immersive reading from the podcast collided against the Saturday afternoon 4th St. panel that took one of the conventions perennial verities—that writers are dealt certain cards for free (the ability to write great dialogue, an eye for structure, etc.) while they need to develop other skills—and wondered if that could also be extended to reading. At one point, moderator Erik Grove re-cast the metaphor and asked the panelists what their reading "superpower" was.

As I was driving home on Saturday, I realized that one of my reading cards or superpowers is the ability to still read naively even though I also have a strong inner gaze (including, often a running monologue in my head; I'm almost always writing when not required to have my attention focused elsewhere). For whatever reason, I generally find it easy to immerse myself in a text. The one exception is if the prose is not just clunky but deploying metaphors, imagery, etc. that don't quite add up (which is why some romantasy has been a struggle for me to read). But assuming the prose doesn't fall into clunky mixed metaphor, I seem to be able to read as a reader and not as a critic to an almost embarrassing degree. I'm almost too beguiled by fiction. I get too immersed in the text—in the emotions of the characters and the rhythm of the prose (I'm sure I'm not the only one who walks around with my inner monologue switched over to the prose style of a particularly well-written work while/just after reading it).

Or to put it another way: it seems I'm a highly sympathetic reader.

The fact I operate in this mode may also be a clue to why I find viewing films in a theater so difficult: it's too immersive for me, especially with the addition of moving images and a soundtrack (I often find myself resenting soundtracks that are too intrusive or blatantly emotionally manipulative). Maybe that's why I'm so selective in what films I watch and tend to prefer television, which gives me the opportunity (commercials, episodes, a smaller screen) for more distance.

This doesn't mean, of course, that I can't approach a text as a critic, writer, or editor. I most definitely can, and they're three connected but discrete modes for me. But I need to turn those modes on and work to sustain them, which is why I always need to re-read when editing or preparing to write about a book or story. I almost always default to the naive, immersive reader on first read-through.

The question I now have, though, is whether that's truly a superpower. Of what use is the ability to read naively? Not that there needs to be a use: reading is central to what I do, and it makes me happy. The fiction and criticism I write comes out of my reading, and when I try to force it in ways that isn't grounded in reading, it doesn't work. The same is true back when I was doing more editing/critique work. And it's not just reading to learn craft or whatever. I'm rarely systematic about it and am bad at reading to focus in on learning one thing. There's a reason I'm a critic rather than a scholar. Instead, I'd say: the thinking I do because of what I read leads to or generates whatever work I do on the literary production side of the equation. This isn't, necessarily, different from scholarship in that there's an input and an output and variables that affect both, but because I'm not an academic and my academic training stopped after my master's degree in comp lit (shout out SF State!) as I turned toward writing fiction, the variables in my equation are jumbled, ad hoc, emotionally as much as intellectually driven, and sometimes strange.

All that being said, if I were to make a guess, I think it's that, for me, the ability to read naively has a two-fold effect:

1. It's a key engine that drives my reading being rather disparate; or to be more precise, it's why I do things like seek out romance and experimental fiction and lit fic, etc. and, while always looking for texts that hit a certain hybridity that delights me, can engage with all of them in similar ways; that is: I buy into their projects and find them all interesting; I have pop and middlebrow and experimental/avant garde tendencies and even if they fight at times (or all the time), none of them are able to grab an upper hand (perhaps, to my detriment, especially when it comes to my fiction writing)
2. It supplies me with an emotional fondness for individual titles that when intense enough leads me to engage with them more abundantly and robustly and longer than I otherwise might

This is not to argue that this makes me special or that many other writers, readers, and critics can't do excellent work or even arrive at the same places I do even if they have a hard time entering the immersive reading mode.

What I am saying, though, is that it seems to me that my ability to default to the immersive reading mode while also being able turn on other modes might be a key to understanding why I write what I write and read what I read.

I hope you will listen to the episode (or any of the other close reading episodes The American Vandal has released over the past year or so), and I hope to write more about close reading in the near future, and, perhaps, do so in relation to immersive reading.

On The Spoils of Poynton and the joy of reading minor works by major authors

My Mom traveled to the Twin Cities for a visit in July. One of the things we talked about is Middlemarch, which she's currently re-reading for the first time in decades. My Mom reading out loud to me when I was a kid is a major contributor to my relationship with literature, but she's also not a steady, voracious ready of fiction. I was delighted to hear she was reading Middlemarch (I recently purchased a paper version of the novel for when I next re-read it; my last re-read was in ebook form and while I'm a big fan of ebooks as a format, certain titles just need to be read in print, if possible), and I was interested to hear what she was noticing during this re-read. Our discussion also turned to what else she might want to read or re-read from the 19th century, and, of course, I recommended work by Edith Wharton and Henry James (she's already read some work by both of them). In doing so, I looked up James's oeuvre just to double-check which of his works I'd read and noticed a title that hadn't registered for me before: The Spoils of Poynton.

I read the description of it on Wikipedia and was intrigued. It's about a young woman who gets caught up in the tussle between a mother and her son for a beautifully decorated English country home.

It's not available in Standard Ebooks form, so I grabbed a Project Gutenberg version of it and read it on my phone.

It is not the first or even the seventh Henry James book you should read. Start with The Portrait of a Lady or The Bostonians with his first phase or The Ambassadors for his later phase. Indeed, given how much other Henry James there is to read, there's probably no reason to read it at all.

But I did read it.

And it was awesome.

The reason for this is that The Spoils of Poynton was written after his initial phase of major novels and after he turned away from novel writing to try to make it as a playwright and failed. The Spoils of Poynton, then is not just a minor work, but also a bridge between where he'd been and tried to be and where he'd fully come into his late style powers in the trio of The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors, and The Golden Bowl.

Like the later novels, Poynton is told ornately, often abstractly, where the littlest tremor in a relationship reverberates in the prose as if it were a sonic boom. At the same time, it's more theatrical, even melodramatic, almost silly.

I'm not recommending it. But what I am recommending is reading minor works by major authors. And by major authors, I don't mean canonical writers, I mean any author who has a decent-sized body of work in a genre or mode you enjoy.

There's a certain muted yet satisfying joy in seeing them try something and/or not be working at the height of their powers. Not so much because it makes them seem more flawed or human, which is encouraging to us mere mortal writers (ah, they weren't perfect!), but because such frailty or incompleteness or low-key minor-ness is an interesting aesthetic experience in and of itself.

This is not me throwing out that old chestnut about writers can often learn more by reading "bad" novels. Instead, it's a celebration of work that adds dimension to one's understanding of the author's project. With Poynton, we get to meet a version of James that isn't yet ready to let go of the theatrical and is still a little clumsy in his description of interiority. Who is willing to make the subtext the text rather than just subsuming all the text and subtext in his dense prose. Who may even have a sense of humor.

I don't know. Maybe this is something only writers like, but I recommend trying it at some point (but only after reading some of the author's best stuff, of course, it's a flavor best savored after the main meal).

See you in September!

(possibly a bit earlier if 11 bookmarks is up for pre-order sooner than then)