![]() However, the counterpointing Siddhartha Deb awards writers more personal responsibility for what they ignore: refugees drowning at sea, life in solitary confinement, endless doomed struggles to merely pay the rent. As a result, Mathis says, "We have elevated suffering to the highest of virtues." Today's writers, she said, have dived into a sea of "despair, alienation, and bleakness." And she sees the reason clearly-a need to "write against" our culture's most common images of how people live: those created by ad writers and political speech-makers. One such recent spectrum was book subjects that are "underrepresented in contemporary fiction." (Though the question “Compared with what?” was ignored, I think the intended answer would be the world we breathe and bleed and breed in.)įor Ayana Mathis, joy was on top of the “missing” list. What else is life here for anyway?īookends is a New York Times column in which two writers go mano a mano over a book-related issue chosen by editors to put them at opposite ends of the widest possible spectrum. It simply means I’ve moved from one kind of challenge to another. But that doesn’t make it a bad thing at all. So yeah, as I noted upfront, having an author’s hat on feels a little strange. And it feels like a good world to be in for me, with powerful reward from both the enthusiastic response readers are giving Fascinating Facts, and from knowing I’m doing the max to help myself, in the super-tough job of connecting a book with readers. I sit here at my computer having been “launched”- personally-into the world of appearances, interviews, tweets, reviews, Facebook, articles, signings, readings, blogs, press releases, etc/etc/etc. book readers (or a reasonable percentage thereof) to choose my book over anyone else’s? The answer I’ve always told Terra Nova authors is “marketing.” And if I didn’t already know it, I’d tell it to myself now. How can I survive? How can I convince the 173 million U.S. ![]() The same eight hundred new books published every day that every other author is up against is aiming to shove me into the remainder bin as well. ![]() So now I’m a “published author.” And though I was obviously spared some authors’ ordeal with their editor and/or publisher, I’m not spared those authors’ confrontation with the marketplace. It’s a gift I love to share-and to receive in return the next person’s intriguing and unexpected knowledge of the state. It’s information that adds a real fullness to my life in New Mexico, and it inspires me to share some of that fullness with others. (Maybe it’s the Danube or Nile or Monongahela.)īut generally speaking, what’s behind the book is the fact that I simply became so fascinated by the state’s people and places and stories as I learned more and more about them-and since most of those thirty-one years were spent in the newspaper business, I came to learn a great deal. ![]() It’s titled Fascinating Facts of New Mexico, and it’s available at your local bookstore or via cyberspace from some outfit named after a river, but I forget which. If you’d like an idea of what specifically those tentacles consist of, sorry but you’ll have to buy the book. Somehow, over that time, it has spread tentacles that seized and entrapped my inner feelings. It’s the state I’ve lived in for thirty-one of the past thirty-eight years. This book has come to be because of a powerful force acting on me. But now I’ve published a book that I wrote myself (though edited by someone else, of course). The norm at Terra Nova is that I’m editing books and publishing books written by other people.
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