William S. Burroughs turned 100 back in February — and we’re all still celebrating!
Today the WSB@100 Festival continues at the CUNY Center for Humanities. What I particularly love about this event is how academic it is! Though the writers associated with the so-called Beat Generation are studied in colleges across the country, many critics and scholars alike still focus more on the writers’ personal lives than on their literature. The William S. Burroughs Centennial Conferences tackles weightier issues such as innovation and technique, the business of publishing, and gender politics.
Held in honor of the centennial of William S. Burroughs’s birth, and the WSB@100 Festival in New York City scheduled for the entirety of the month of April, 2014, this conference will explore the life and works of one of the most innovative and influential twentieth-century American writers and artists. Join us for a series of talks and roundtables by editors, artists, and scholars on a range of issues from the problem of gender in Burroughs’s writings to his role in postwar America little magazines, his still unpublished archival materials, cut-up experiments and novels, and his photography.
“Listen to my last words any world. Listen all you boards syndicates and governments of the earth. And you power powers behind what filth deals consummated in what lavatory to take what is not yours. To sell the ground from unborn feet. Listen. What I have to say is for all men everywhere. I repeat for all. No one is excluded. Free to all who pay. Free to all who pain pay.” – William S. Burroughs
10:00AM Editing Burroughs with John Bennett and Geoffrey Smith
11:00AM Burroughs and Literary Magazines with Jed Birmingham, Charles Plymell, and Jan Herman
12:30PM Lunch
2:00PM Biography and Photography: Barry Miles in conversation with Oliver Harris
3:30PM Gender Trouble with Anne Waldman, Regina Weinreich, and Ann Douglas
5:15PM Coffee Break
5:30PM
Keynote: Oliver Harris Cutting up the Trilogy
Cosponsored by the English Students Association, Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative, the PhD Program in English, the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies, the Doctoral Students’ Council, and the WSB@100 Festival.
You can find all the information on the CUNY website.
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Interested in how William S. Burroughs helped shape Jack Kerouac’s literature? Check out Burning Furiously Beautiful: The True Story of Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road,” the book I coauthored with Paul Maher Jr. (2013). It’s available through Lulu’s print edition, Amazon, and Barnes & Noble.
I wrote recently about how Jack Kerouac kept a dream journal and have been blogging a lot about social media. In a recent Salon article, Michele Filgate wonders “Will social media kill writers’ diaries?: Now Facebook and Twitter are business necessities, they may be losing writers’ journals. Is something lost?”
Filgate writes that authors’ personal diaries offer a key into their literary development and intentions. She says authors’ social media posts can do the same thing, but that it’s not as authentic:
Even if there is a level of acting involved in authors who use social media, it isn’t anything new. Brian Morton (author of “Starting Out in the Evening” points out: “I’ve read that Tolstoy used to keep two diaries, one that he left lying around for other people to read, the other a more intimate record for himself alone. I think self-exposure on social media is probably like the diary we leave out for others. There’s probably always an element of performance in it, even when it seems most naked.”
The pressure to build a platform and use social media is real for authors. Finding time to write isn’t always easy to begin with, but not it’s a constant juggle between writing (and researching, editing, and pitching) and social media (blogging, tweeting, facebook-ing, and pinterest-ing). In addition to big writing projects, many writers are also taking on small projects, like writing articles for various lit mags.
Diary keeping is last on my literary to-do list, and I miss it! Not only do I miss it for personal reasons, but I miss having a record of what I was going through and what I was feeling at various points in my life. Especially as a memoirist, I think it’s essential to keep a diary.
Here are
It is a log for when and where we were on exact days
It reminds us of precise events in our life
It reminds us of little details that we forget over time
It is a more accurate record of our emotions than our social media entries
It is a raw space to create
It’s a reminder of our growth in life
It’s a reminder of our literary accomplishments
It’s a place to dream and make goals
It’s a good way to warm up our writing muscles
Technology changes over time, so having a tangible diary preserves our day-to-day thoughts
How do you juggle journal-keeping with your other writing and social media? How has keeping a diary helped your writing?
Huffington Post columnist and Burnside Writers Collective colleague Emily Timbol invited me to join a blog hop organized by writer Kirsten Oliphant of the wonderfully titled blog I Still Hate Pickles. You may remember that I participated in The Next Big Thing Blog Hop last year. I kind of feel like they’re the chain letters of the blog world and am infinitely curious who’s in my six degrees of separation.
Kirsten says in her “about me” section on her blog that she doesn’t like rules, so it should come as no surprise that she gave me and the other blog hoppers some general guidelines but told us we didn’t have to follow any set format or answer every question. Since I’m one of those creative types that tends to actually like rules (blame the editor side of my brain), I am taking a literal approach to the blog hop and answering her questions one by one.
What makes you (or makes a person) a writer?
A while back there was a funny meme going around called “What People Think Writers Do,” which shows just how relevant it is to discuss what makes a person a writer. There are all sorts of writers—some are political journalists, some write children’s books, some have their books turned into films, some are hobbyists. I don’t think it’s fair to place absolute judgment on who qualifies as a writer. There are many poets and fiction writers who only became famous late in life or even after death. Is a little girl writing in a diary a writer? What if I tell you her name is Anne Frank? Is a doctor who writes poetry on the side a writer? What if his name is William Carlos Williams? Okay, but what if that doctor is a career oncologist who writes nonfiction about cancer? Does it make a difference if his name is Siddhartha Mukherjee and he won a Pulitzer Prize for The Emperor of Maladies? Even if he never writes another book again? Is a blogger a writer? Is a grant writer a writer? Is someone a writer just because they have to write emails at work? Is there a difference between being a writer and writing? I wouldn’t say that whether someone is published or not or whether someone earns money or not means they are or are not a writer, but I would suggest that being a writer, in the sense of it meaning more than someone who occasionally writes their name on a check or writes a grocery list, means being intentional. This could mean being intention in carving out time for writing or being intentional in the selection of words, but not necessarily so: William S. Burroughs, for instance, used a cut-up technique that displaced authorial syntax yet he is still considered a writer.
So do I have the right to call myself a writer? Well, my name has appeared on book covers across the country and the New Yorker and the Paris Review have mentioned my writing. Then again, I don’t live off my writing—I didn’t even make a thousand dollars off my writing last year—and most people have never heard of me. I call myself a writer because even when I’m not writing I am thinking about writing.
Why is it sometimes hard to fess up to being a writer?
There are two big reasons why I sometimes have a difficult time admitting I’m a writer. The first is that when I introduce myself as a writer to people, they automatically ask who my publisher is—and I mean even people who aren’t in the industry suddenly want to know who the gatekeepers who let me through are or want some sort of proof that validates me as more than just the (in their mind) dreaded hobbyist. I feel like it’s like saying I’m a woman, and then someone asking who my gynecologist is. For the record, Barnes & Noble and HarperCollins Publishers have published books containing my writing. The truth, though, is that I sometimes don’t feel comfortable confessing to being a writer because I haven’t written, or published, a full-length book by myself—yet.
The second reason I don’t always like confessing that I’m a writer is because I am an editor. I personally feel that these two callings work well together, but I have noticed that people in publishing houses tend to think that the only reason I am an editor is because I’m trying to get published. I wish I was that savvy! The truth is that I began a career in book publishing because I love working with words. When I was starting out as a proofreader, the idea of being an author seemed like some far-off imagery dream, like being an astronaut. I always had a need to write, and even back then wrote for various publications, but I wasn’t diligently working on my own book. I really love working at a publishing house, seeing a book go from concept to finished product. I love working with authors and helping them achieve their dreams. From my experience, there are a lot of people in the industry who are editors and publishers because they love books and not because they themselves want to be writers. I just happen to be both.
How does writing affect your identity or otherwise impact your life?
I tend to view my experiences through the lens of being a writer. When I go to an art gallery, I automatically think that I have to write about the art I saw. When there’s a particularly momentous current event, I feel the need to write it down in my diary. It’s not just a matter of mining life for stories. I process information by writing. I often joke that I don’t really know what I think about something until I write about it.
Being a memoirist has helped me understand my identity beyond being a writer. Agents and editors tell writers that their main characters should never be a writer. But what do you do if you’re a memoirist and your main character is you, a writer? You dig deeper, you don’t allow your writerly self to speak for who you are. When you can’t rely on that shorthand of clichés about being a writer, that fancy wordwork that hides your true identity, you’re left with just yourself. Writing doesn’t just allow me to be myself—it forces me to be myself.
Want to join the blog hop? Answer the questions however you see fit on your own blog and post a link below as well as link to Kirsten’s post.
I am so excited to have been tagged by Maria Karamitsos for the The Next Big Thing Blog Hop. Even though I’m not a mother, I love reading Maria’s blog From the Mommy Files, which is full of humor and light. She has the gift of storytelling. Her blog entries read like snippets of a novel-like memoir, with dialogue, reflection, and a strong voice, despite the fact that much of her writing is focused on what could be a very technical topic: molar pregnancy. Take for instance, her post “The Influence of the Lost Child,” in which she talks to her two adorable little girls—”BooBoo BeDoux” and “Bebs LaRoux”—about the baby she miscarried. It’s a difficult and heartbreaking subject, yet she injects humor in it through the personalities of her daughters (“it’s tough to be 3, after all!”) as well as tenderness and faith. I’m really excited about the book she’s writing called Positive About Negative: Adventures in Molar Pregnancy. Maria also tagged some other Greek authors for the Blog Hop, and it’s great discovering all these writers.
I’m tempted therefore to write about my memoir about being Greek American, but since my book on Jack Kerouac is coming out first my answers to the Blog Hop questions are about that book.
What is the working title of your book? Burning Furiously Beautiful: The True Story of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road
Where did the idea come from for the book? Paul Maher Jr. had written a book entitled Jack Kerouac’s American Journey: The Real-Life Odyssey of “On the Road” for the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Kerouac’s seminal work. I had read this book one summer and some months later began reading Paul’s blog. We began talking and decided to revise and expand his book because we knew that a film adaptation of On the Road was coming out and we wanted to provide a resource for those interested in finding out more about this famous novel. It was important to us that the book had a strong narrative, contextual information, and new research because we wanted both the teenager turned on from the film and the literary scholar who’s read every book by Kerouac to enjoy it and find value in it.
What genre does your book fall under? It’s literary criticism and biography.
Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition? Isn’t that the million dollar question? There’s been a lot of talk over the years about who should play Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty in the film adaptation of On the Road. Johnny Depp, Brad Pitt, Colin Farrell, Marlon Brando, you name it, they’ve been associated with it. I almost never go to the movies and don’t really know the young actors of today well enough to say who would be age appropriate to cast. Joseph Gordon-Levitt? Zac Efron? These actors are too old to play the roles now but if I were casting the film back when I first read On the Road as a teenager, this is who I’d pick:
Sal Paradise — Johnny Depp and Ethan Hawke would be excellent choices for Sal Paradise, particularly because they both have a deep appreciation for literature. Depp is a known Kerouac fan and just started his own publishing imprint, and Hawke is a published author.
Dean Moriarty — Woody Harrelson would make a great Dean Moriarty. He can play both earnest and wild so well! Matthew McConaughey would be great as Dean too.
Carlo Marx — I loved James Franco’s portrayal of Allen Ginsberg in Howl, but if I had to select someone else I might go with AdamGoldberg.
Old Bull Lee — The choice of Viggo Mortensen as Old Bull Lee for the Walter Salles film is brilliant, but again if I had to choose someone else maybe I’d with Ewan McGregor.
Marylou — Drew Barrymore would be so much fun to watch as Marylou. Do you remember her in Mad Loveand Boys on the Side? Almost Famous hadn’t been made yet when I was a teenager but Kate Hudson (think Penny Lane) would be my runner-up pick.
What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book? Burning Furiously Beautiful tells the true story of Jack Kerouac travels on the road and how it took him years, not weeks, to write On the Road.
Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency? We decided to self-publish Burning Furiously Beautiful.
How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript? The first draft, so to speak, had already been written and published as Jack Kerouac’s American Journey.
What other books would you compare this story to within your genre? There have been so many biographies of Kerouac written over the years, and each offers its own perspective. Burning Furiously Beautiful uses Kerouac’s journals and letters, as well as archival material from other people who knew Kerouac during the time he was on the road and writing On the Road, to tell a the specific story of the making of a novel that continues to generate interest today.
Who or What inspired you to write this book? Obviously, Paul Maher Jr. inspired Burning Furiously Beautiful as it was his original idea. I, however, had been researching and writing about Kerouac since I was an undergrad many years prior to this and brought my own knowledge and skills to the project. I was very much inspired by the fact that the film adaptation is soon to be released here in the States. There’s a whole new generation coming to Kerouac’s literature, which is immensely exciting to me. Reading Kerouac when I was in high school opened up so many possibilities for me as a reader and writer. I hope that the film will pique people’s interest so that they’ll go back and read Kerouac’s books for themselves—not just On the Road but his other great works as well—and that they’ll watch Pull My Daisy, the film that Kerouac himself spontaneously narrated. Burning Furiously Beautiful is important because it contextualizes On the Road and provides a fascinating look at Kerouac’s life and writing process. This is critical because there’s so much myth surrounding Kerouac and the 1950s. I became engrossed in odd little details like the fact that the Kerouac’s didn’t have a phone and took their calls at the store below their apartment in Queens. It’s so different than today when it seems like every middle schooler has a cell phone. If Cassady could’ve just called Kerouac up on his iphone, he might not have written the infamous Joan Anderson letter that spurred on Kerouac’s writing style.
What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?Burning Furiously Beautiful is a great book for an aspiring writer, regardless of whether or not you like Kerouac’s writing style. It’s a portrait of a young writer and details how his writing voice developed (his first book has a much different style), what his writing routine was, the editing process (yes, there was one!), what his relationship with other writers and editors was like (imagine lots of parties), and the many false starts he had in writing his book. We even talk about book signings, contracts, and press interviews. Sometimes I’ve felt frustrated with various writing projects of mine, but realizing that Kerouac, who purported to have written On the Road in only three weeks, went through some of the same struggles and took years to find success makes me realize that it’s all part of the writing process.
Donald Miller’s New York Times-bestselling book Blue Like Jazz recently was made into an indie film, and I had the opportunity to watch a screening in Times Square before the film was officially released on April 13. I’ve had the immense pleasure of meeting and getting to know some of the “characters” in the book. I was so proud of them! Penny Carothers wrote a beautiful article about her experience going to the premier and seeing an actress play her on the silver screen.
The film was very different than the book. I knew this going into it. The story of this process of turning a collection of essays from Blue Like Jazz into an actual storyline is told in Miller’s A Million Miles in a Thousand Years. There’s a scene in A Million Miles when Don is told that he essentially needs to change his life story for the movie. He says:
“You think they might be bored if we just show my life the way it is,” I clarified. I guess I was asking for reassurance that my life was okay.
From the perspective of a fellow memoirist, I found the process fascinating. I think memoirists, particularly those who are in the process of turning their book into a movie, should consider reading Blue Like Jazz and A Million Miles in a Thousand Years and then watching the film, just to get a sense of process.
After watching the film Blue Like Jazz, I can’t help but wonder what will happen with the film On the Road. After all, both are fictional portrayals of real life. If Blue Like Jazz is any indication, On the Road will be very different than the book. A guy I interned with years ago at the Bowery Poetry Club left a comment recently in response to one of my Facebook posts, saying that Kerouac wasn’t a good storyteller. In a way, I kind of agree with him. On the Road would seemingly make a lot more sense if it was just one big road trip across the United States. Instead, the protagonist, Sal Paradise, barely hits the road before he turns back around. There are multiple trips across the country, and the story can get a bit confusing because of that. Maybe Jack Kerouac was trying too hard to stick to the truth to combine all the trips into one. Then again, maybe he knew what he was doing. There’s something so much more telling about Sal Paradise failing his first attempt at road tripping and then frenetically ping-ponging between his mother’s house and the open road than if it had all happened easily, perfectly. Can the film capture that? Will it try? Will gaining cohesive action and a clear plot lessen the reality, the rawness, the beat-ness of life?
While I do recommend Donald Miller’s A Million Miles in a Thousand Years for an honest look at not just the writing process but the process of living life, the Donald Miller book I’d actually recommend as an example of beautiful storytelling and craft is his first book, which was republished as Through Painted Deserts. This is the book that pays more attention to the way words sound as they roll of the page. It inspires because of its beauty and simplicity, and not because of grand, sweeping gestures and actions.
Through Painted Deserts is Donald Miller’s road trip book. Here’s how the overview reads:
This classic road trip tale will inspire readers of all ages.
Fueled by the belief that something better exists than the mundane life they’ve been living, free spirits Don and Paul set off on an adventure-filled road trip in search of deeper meaning, beauty, and an explanation for life. Many young men dream of such a trip, but few are brave enough to actually attempt it. Fewer still have the writing skills of Donald Miller, who records the trip with wide-eyed honesty in achingly beautiful prose. In this completely revised edition, he discusses everything from the nature of friendship, the reason for pain, and the origins of beauty.
As they travel from Texas to Oregon in Paul’s cantankerous Volkswagen van, the two friends encounter a variety of fascinating people, witness the fullness of nature’s splendor, and learn unexpected lessons about themselves, each other, and even God.
Through Painted Deserts is the modern-day, Protestant version of On the Road. It’s about a young man looking for truth out on the open roads of America.
I feel so honored that natural health writer Shea Zukowski thanked me for my editing work in the acknowledgments in her book Lavender, Parsley, Peppermint, and Sage, published by Sterling Publishing! It’s really such a lovely book, filled with natural remedies and organic cleaners that sound good enough to eat. More than just useful tips and recipes, the book is brimming with fascinating trivia on herbs and ancient cultures.
Here’s the description from the back of the book:
Herbs offer powerful, natural, earth-friendly solutions for all sorts of home, garden, and personal needs. This invaluable guide gathers hundreds of simple recipes for herb-based formulas that are safe and effective for use in every home. Herbs have been used for practical purposes for thousands of years—natural and proven, they are a welcome alternative to man-made, often toxic chemicals.
Plus, they are easy and enjoyable to work with: herbs can be crushed, boiled, layered, and/or mixed with oil or water or other handy household ingredients to make hundreds of useful home products, for everything from cleaning to personal care.
Organized by use, this convenient volume presents a wealth of helpful herbal solutions. For each entry, readers will find an introduction describing the best uses for this product, a full ingredient list, step-bystep instructions for preparing the formula, information on storage, and advice on how to use it.
A wonderful gift book and useful reference combined, Lavender, Parsley, Peppermint, and Sage is an indispensable guide for a greener, healthier lifestyle.
What that doesn’t tell you is that it has instructions how how to make French Ironing Water, Just-In-Thyme Disinfectant Cleanser, and Rosemary Muscle Rub. Don’t those sound so luxurious?!
Congrats to Shea Zukowski on the print edition and ebook edition. It was such a pleasure to work on this book! It’s inspired me to whip up my own all-natural products.
I’ve been in publishing mode. I had a bunch of essays that aren’t necessarily part of my in-progress memoir that I’ve been sitting on so I’ve been sending them out to various publications. I have to admit, submissions/querying is a scary process. You work so hard on the writing, only to end up wondering if it will ever see the light of day….
I was super encouraged to read that Kathryn Stockett’s best-selling novel, The Help, was rejected SIXTY times! It’s not so much schadenfreude as it is encouragement and motivation to not give up. Stockett shares her experience in this article on Shine.
While the premise of the article is to not give up on your dream and to keep sending out your writing, I think it’s important to note that Stockett kept revising and improving her novel whenever she got feedback from an agent or editor on why it was rejected. Perseverance is all good and well, but perseverance without a good product is pointless. Stockett worked like mad—even to the point a nurse had to tell her to put the book down because she was going into labor—to make her manuscript the best it could possibly be.
The moral: Find out why your writing got rejected and use the criticism to improve your work.
RT @MichaelHyatt: You don’t have to see the end from the beginning. All you have to see is the next step. 2 years ago
RT @PSLiterary: “You don’t start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap and thinking it’s good stuff, and then gradually you ge… 2 years ago
RT @GarySnyderQuote: I am intrigued by the sense that culture itself has a wild edge. As Claude Levi-Strauss remarked years ago, the arts a… 2 years ago
image via CUNY
Stephanie Nikolopoulos 