Hello. My name is Stephen Knezovich. Pronounced ka-nes-o-vitch. I know, it’s awful–like the hacking cough of an Eastern European hobo.

Growing up my surname served as a verbal embarrassment for myself and anyone forced to attempt a pronunciation (the most common victims being indolent telemarketers and hapless schoolmarms). It was such an awful name (even in Western PA where homeroom roll call sounds like a Russian hockey squad) that at one point my mother–whose maiden name is the very sensible, very German, Fiedler–was so fed up with the name that she campaigned for a legal name change.

Her solution was simple enough. Translate it to English. Unfortunately, in Croatian, Knezovich translates to “son of prince.” Which means if my mother was successful, the world would now know me as Stephen Prince. Jesus, could you imagine? Even if I woke up one day and accidentally published (or wrote) something I would never be better than Stephen King.

With all the recent posts lately about names (not to mention my girlfriends insistence that the to be a successful athlete you need a cool name), I’m really considering a name change. Now, I don’t want to venture too far from the original (Stephen Michael Knezovich), but if I’m going to make it as a writer, I only have two options 1) get a zippier name, or 2) actually sit down and write something.

Here’s are the names I’ve been kicking around (suggestions welcome):

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Find exemplars wherever you can.

Last week while talking to my creative writing class about various structures they might try fitting their fiction into I found myself suddenly using the movie The Hangover as an example of a classic story form. My students, all of whom save two had seen the movie, were excited to talk about something they actually liked and engaged in willingly outside of class. “Oh yeah, that movie was so funny!” they exclaimed while I tried to backtrack a little in order to make sure they understood that we were still having a constructive, academic conversation. We’d talked a bit about journey stories already, and several students had attempted writing road trip stories, knowing from reading our textbook that it’s usually a bad idea to write a scene that places one character alone in a car unless they are thinking about something active outside of the car, a flashback maybe, since a one-person scene tends to lack energy or conflict, two things that stories thrive on. So I ask them, “Why do you think the writers chose to place four men together in this car? Why not two?” One student said that if there were only two guys the story couldn’t have existed because one of the guys has to go missing for the plot to go on. “Okay, good point, but why four? What is each character doing in this movie? How does each one play an important role in propelling the plot?” That’s when the conversation improved. Read more »

Ottoman. Footstool. Tuffet. Hassock.

O. Henry.

Lon Chaney, Jr. and Nicolas Cage.

Lewis Carroll. Mark Twain. Ayn Rand.

Sid Vicious. Of course Diddy. Read more »

Small Presses Are So Punk Rock!

At the Small Press Festival this weekend on the campus of CU Boulder, a panel of editors turned their attention to the notion of “making it” as a writer today.

While making it in our recent past consisted of getting large advances from major publishers, Jeremy Davies, editor for Dalkey Archive Press of Champaign and London, described making it today as: “You have a book out? You’re okay? You’re eating? Regularly?”

“As a poet,” added Anna Moschavakis, editor for Ugly Duckling Presse of New York, “making it is if someone I don’t know has read something I wrote.”

Victoria Blake, founder of Underland Press in Portland, OR, added the idea of being chosen to the discussion. She said she realized she could make more money publishing her fiction herself than if she waited for another publisher to pick it up. Why wasn’t she self-publishing? Because, she realized, she wanted “to be picked by someone.” Read more »

When (non-writing) people find out I’m a writer, one of the first questions they usually ask (right after something along the lines of how I plan to make money) is what kind of books I write. When I say literary fiction I’m usually met with a blank stare and I end up trying to explain:

“It’s general fiction. I tend to write stories about families.”

“I want to write the type of stories you probably read in English classes.”

“It’s not fantasy or women’s literature or mystery or anything like that. It’s just everyday stuff.”

These all fail for obvious reasons: they are too general, they discredit the work I’m doing, they describe it for what it isn’t. At this point I usually start offering the titles of the books I’m reading at that moment (and I seem incapable of reading fewer than five at any given time), but people rarely have heard of them. Then comes the killer question.

“So what’s your favorite book?”

I never have any clue how to answer this question. First, this question is one that begs a recommendation, but I’d venture a guess that the average reader has different taste than I do. I avoid bestsellers—not because I feel that something successful is somehow tainted of worth but because I’ve rarely enjoyed books I pulled from the bestsellers shelf. There have been a few (The Time Traveler’s Wife, Wicked, The Glass Castle) but more often I read a few pages only to find that nothing entices me.

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A few weeks ago, MelinaCR referred me to a website which has replaced nearly ten of my usual hits: Matchbookstory.com. I won’t detail the interface of the site too much, as clicking on the link above is all you need to do for intuition to take over, but once you’ve registered, the goal is to write a 300 character short story. Each letter, number, space, and paragraph break counts as a character. Basically, it’s like writing an extraordinarily creative text message, but with an extra 140 characters to play with – a little extra sand to finish your castle. As you type away, a descending counter displays the remaining characters. After editing, abbreviating, swapping ands for ampersands, or whatever character maintenance strategies suit you, click the submit button and wait a few weeks to hear back from the editors. Or, you can write another story – there’s no submission limit. Winners’ stories are printed on matchbooks and distributed throughout California, and hopefully Washington, Oregon, and beyond, and shortlisters are published online. It’s free, it’s a way to get your name out there, and it’s a far better way to procrastinate than complaining on Facebook about only getting two hours of sleep, or whatever. Read more »

I’ve had instruction on the brain lately.

For one thing, there’s the matter of my aforementioned creative writing class at the alternative school. And we’ve had some fun here at Bark with lists and advice, prohibitions and declarations about what makes for good writing. Then I read a long, fascinating article in the New York Times Magazine yesterday, about how teachers are taught and how they might be taught better.

Do it this way

But, more importantly to me and, I’m sure, to you, is the fact that I’m in the midst of potty training my toddler son. In between all the discussions about “big-boy underwear” and rabid parental cheering for bowel movements, I’ve found myself in a metaphorical frame of mind, and thinking of a cheesy book proposal — a cute, aphorism-filled slice of life they can park next to the cash register. Something like, “Everything I Needed to Know About Life I Learned While Pooping on My Father.” Or, “Who Moved My Spider-Man Training Pants?”

Once I land on the right title, I think the book will write itself.

Of course, the Good Lord himself, long before the first blog post was written, struggled with the issue of instruction. Back in the day, when he was looking to get through to people, a way to really connect with them, vis-à-vis the whole morality/obedience/virtue nexus, he struck on an idea.

Why not a list? The 10 Commandments. The ultimate in concise, clearcut instruction. Except that Christopher Hitchens — the liquor-bloated professional contrarian — argues that they’re not so ultimate, after all. In a piece in Vanity Fair, Hitchens takes on the Old Testament’s Top 10, and tries to improve on them.

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On Friday Molly Giles graced Spokane with her presence and what a treat it was. I’m not going to lie I hadn’t heard of her, but I guess if you think of all the great books out there and all of the really horrible books, its kind of amazing any one author stands out at all. I had come across Giles’s Creek Walk and Other Stories in the local independent book store a few weeks ago. I read the blurbs on the back, which sounded complimentary, as to be expected and the cover was really intriguing. It was even resting on top of a staff pick sign but stupid me I thought about my quickly diminishing bank account and decided if I hadn’t heard of it I didn’t need to take a chance on a book because of the cover.

As the universe goes sometimes, I realized this week that Giles would be in town and that on more than one occasion I passed up picking up a copy of her book so I rode my bike to the independent book store and they were all out of copies. I went home to check if any of the chains stores in town would have a copy and they didn’t. I had no choice but to wait until Giles’s reading to get a copy.

Unfortunately, I had to go to the reading without reading anything the author had written and I hate that then pair that with having a, what was I thinking when I thought I could be a writer, days I got to the reading expecting to not be impressed. Man, was I wrong. Giles was beautiful, poised, articulate and funny. When the reading was through, and though I hadn’t read the book yet, I shyly asked her to sign my copy. We chatted politely for a while and she signed my book. Nothing fancy, simply, “With best wishes!” She closed my book and handed it back to me. Then she told me to just go ahead and read “The Writers’ Model,” that it was short and she winked at me. Okay she probably had dust in her eye, but in my fantasy that Giles and I shared a connection for a moment where she could see that I needed a bit of encouragement that maybe someday I could come close to what she had done. I went home for a while and read the story she suggested and a few others and they touched me in an odd way. The prose is tight, the stories are funny, tragic, thought provoking basically everything I could ever hope for in a story. I know it’s kind of lame to quote a book blurb but, “Wow! …This collection should be on every woman’s shelf. Men too….” (Ruth Moose, News and Record) All I can say is pick up a copy. You’ll be glad you did.

What's on your fridge?

A week ago, my best friend sent me a little box of smut, which I tore open and stuck on my fridge. It’s got the body-part verbs and nouns you’d expect from a box of smut. Next to the smut are words from the red kit. (They make blue, green, and pink kits, too.) So, the right side of my fridge is pretty saucy, or perchance one pairing away from a new fetish that climaxes in a “rhubarb moan” or a “naked lobster rocket.”

All these shenanigans aside–I have “inspirational” words  on the front of my fridge–I like that fiddling with Magnetic Poetry makes me feel clever, even if it’s only one time out of ten. I’m interested in the juxtapositions that come out of such a limited vocabulary. It’s like a surrealist game. Here I imagine Breton pulling words, one at a time, from a fancy hat and reading them at the cabaret. It’s a social thing, too: arraigning words on your friend’s fridge for him or her to find later.

When I browse independent bookstores, I love exploring the books more prominently displayed than others. Especially the ones on the shelves—as opposed to the “New” or “Clearance” tables—because they are usually staff favorites and include a personal recommendation of the book.  When I visit chain stores, I purposely don’t pay attention to books at the entrance of the store or that have anything but their spine turned toward me on the shelves. Call me paranoid, but I figure special displays are part of the mega stores’ evil plan to get me to buy books they want to push of the shelves or allow them larger profit margin. I may have to change this attitude now that I’ve discovered B&N’s Discover Great New Writers program. (It’s been around for twenty years, I’m a little slow on discoveries.)

Through this program, publishers recommend writers making a strong literary debut who have fewer than three previously published books, have not received a major literary award, or whose net sales have not yet reached 10, 000 copies. Literary fiction, short story collections, and non-fiction with strong narrative qualify for submission. B&N in-house volunteers read the books and choose 12-22 the titles each season who receive face out displays in the “Discover bay” in each of B&N’s stores for 12 weeks, including an individual “shelf-talker” with a “teaser line.” They also receive major marketing support for things like book group discussions and through the B&N website. Previous year’s selected titles include The Lovely Bones, The Kite Runner, and The Time Traveler’s Wife.

But wait, there’s more! Each year, a panel of previously “discovered” writers picks the winners for the Discover Awards. The 2009 awards were just announced and the first place fiction and nonfiction cash prices of $10 000 went to Victor Lodato’s “haunting debut” novel Mathilda Savitch and Dave Cullen’s “meticulously researched” Colombine. A short-story collection and a cartographic history received the $5000 second place prices, while another novel and a memoir collected $2500 each for third place.

What do you think? Does this promotion of literary writing dilute some of the hatred we so love to feel for non-independent stores?