The man responsible for sparking my interest in both reading and writing, Jerome David Salinger, has died. BBC News is reporting that he “died of natural causes, his son said in a statement released by his literary agent.”

I’m sure I’m not alone in wondering what kind of craziness is going to ensue from this. If you remember, Salinger hasn’t published anything since the 60s. But that doesn’t mean he had stopped writing. With the dubious stuff his children have done in the past (“Dream Catcher,” anyone?), I’m sure we’re going to see the floodgates open up and a deluge of previously unpublished work come out. Think of all the money a lot of people stand to make off this sad news.

For now, though, as we wait to see what happens next… check out my previous feature about my own personal Salinger Library including links to places on the internet where you can read his entire (published and uncollected) oeuvre.

Dear people:

Today I stumbled upon the very awesome blog Letters of Note. In their own words, “Letters of Note is an attempt to gather and sort fascinating letters, postcards, telegrams, faxes, and memos.” From the letter of a child detailing his rocket ship designs “to a top scientist,” to a letter from Einstein proclaiming that “the word God is nothing more than the expression and product of human weakness,” this blog could entertain you for hours. But what struck me was a letter from Kurt Vonnegut Jr to his family after he escaped Dresden at the end of World War II. The experiences outlined in Vonnegut’s letter are both horrifying and incredibly worthy of respect. And on an even more visceral level, it makes me feel like writers today are all academic pansies. How many modern writers do you know “were put to work carrying corpses from Air-Raid shelters” or lived through a massive bombing raid that “killed 250,000 people in twenty-four hours and destroyed all of Dresden?” Horrible as it may be, it’s also pretty badass.

This experience of Vonnegut’s and the events outlined in this letter are what inspired his novel Slaughterhouse-Five, which was what his underground slaughterhouse-cum-prison was known as to his German captors. Vonnegut’s letter is not only an enlightening piece of literary history, it is a fantastic document of world history as well. It demonstrates to us how awful war is, how children writing to their parents had to begin letters with statements like “I’m told that you were probably never informed that I was anything other than ‘missing in action.’”

I’ve posted the scans of the letter below, which were originally available here at archive.org. If you check out Vonnegut’s letter at Letters of Note, you can read it transcribed as well and may soon find yourself sifting through all the other letters in their collection.

The internet-as-publisher has, for a long time, been given a bad reputation by the literati and print publishing world. Work published online has been seen as somewhat inferior to work published in print, mostly because it’s labeled as more of a vanity thing. Anybody can start a website or blog and put their work out there. Moreover, anybody can start an online literary journal and distribute the work of others. There’s little oversight, or at least it may be perceived as such, and the quality of both writing and editing is suspect. Print, however, has a long history of authority and quality and is therefore, by inertia alone, the top tier of what any aspiring writer could want.

But if running this blog for what’s coming on a year has taught me anything, it’s that this assumption, which once held validity in the public eye and in my own mind, has become completely false.

True, getting accepted into a respected print journal is an admirable accomplishment and a noble goal. But I’m inclined to think that the more important accomplishment for any writer is obtaining readership. The internet, as compared to a printed journal, offers near unlimited readership. More than that, upon being published online your work is submitted to an easily searchable digital library that will never go away. Being published in print limits you not only to a journal’s regular subscriber base and the booksellers through which they may distribute, but you’re also limited by time. How long before any particular issue of a journal goes out of print forever? Six months? One year? And what of that aforementioned subscriber base, how many people does that really entail? Is it in the thousands or merely in the hundreds? When you publish your work in a print journal, how many people are actually reading your story?

Let’s look at this question from a different perspective: technology. Ten years ago, at the beginning of the new millennium, how many people who you knew had a cell phone or an mp3 player? Ask yourself that same question but apply it to the present time. Do you know anybody right now, apart from maybe a grandparent or two, who doesn’t have these things or some device that does both? Now let’s think about books and technology. The phenomenon of the e-reader has yet to fully take off, but the Amazon Kindle has certainly proved to be a success and Barnes and Noble couldn’t keep up with the demand for their new Nook over the holiday season. As these devices mature, as the technology progresses, as the prices decline, all people who love reading will own an e-reader. It’s not a question of “if” it’s a question of “when.” Trust me, I love the smell of an old book as much as anybody out there; I love digging through the stacks at a used bookstore looking for treasures. Books-as-ephemera is my thing, as I’ve said many times here. But the reality is that era is over. Our lives are infiltrated by all things digital more and more everyday and to deny it, or to cling to the past out of nostalgia or fear or whatever, is simply being a luddite. There’s nothing wrong with appreciating something for the sake of nostalgia, but to deny something wholeheartedly because of nostalgia is akin to sticking your fingers in your ears and screaming “I can’t hear you!”

The truth is, while printed books will always remain for the sake of nostalgia, as collector’s items, as a higher-priced “print!” edition to accompany a digital download, the internet and digital media are unequivocally the future of literature.

I am surprised daily by the amount of traffic this blog receives and it’s enlightening to see which posts garner the most traffic. Even more interesting than that, a number of posts have been viewed by over a thousand people. Each month is better than the last in terms of traffic and as long as the content here is worthwhile to people, that trend won’t subside. The print publishing world is a constant struggle, an uphill battle filled with middlemen and people who all want a piece of the pie. Online, however, you are in charge of everything. There are no page or word limits. It is a true Democracy on the internet, despite it being viewed as a digital Wild West. If you produce quality, people will come. There is no agent or editor determining whether or not your writing is marketable, there is no undergraduate or MFA candidate sussing out the best stories for their university’s journal… there is only the reader. You write for yourself and the reader alone will determine your work’s worth.

I admit, this idea is not yet fully realized but it’s silly to deny that it won’t soon become reality. It’s also silly to think that middlemen will go away; they won’t. Editors are important to cull together a collection, much as a curator does for a gallery exhibit, but publishing and editing and writing will be much more populist in the near future. Agents may have a tougher time in the future, as they will be less necessary (if at all), but if there’s money to be made someone will figure out a way. Ultimately, though, despite the quantity of writing that will be available online, the quality of the work is what will make a writer both prevalent and relevant — not their access to print.

What do you think?

It appeared for a while that the novella was dead. A form length so often employed by writers of the the late 1800s and early 1900s, the novella in the modern day is sometimes looked down upon. Most of the major publishing houses won’t touch them unless you’re already a big name, they’re too long for literary journals to print, so the general consensus is either trim it down or fatten it up. But the novella has a long and worthy history. Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, these (among others) are the great novellas we know. The modern novella, however, is not as easy to put one’s finger on.

Then I found John Madera’s excellent essay on the subject, Call Me Fish-Owl: Reflecting on the Novella’s neither Fish nor Fowl Status. Mostly Madera addresses what it means to be a novella; that is to say, how long is a novella truly? This is something not easily determined and it’s debatable whether or not this even needs to be determined. Following his treatise is a well-compiled list of over sixty writers, editors, and publishers and their favorite novellas. Just recently, Madera published an addendum to his original essay called Little Monsters: Recommended Novellas. Here, he gives us even more writers and their favorite novellas. John deserves heaps of praise for putting this all together and you should certainly check it out.

With publishers like Melville House and their Classic Novellas and Contemporary Novellas series, the Miami University Press Novella Contest, and blogs such as John Madera’s championing their return, novellas definitely have a shot in the modern publishing world. When you don’t quite want to commit to a 300+ page novel, but a short story just isn’t enough to satiate your appetite, where do you go?

Granted, I come to this subject with a slight bias.  I am the editor-in-chief of the magazine in question, and I helped put this event together.  But what can I say: it’s a launch party on the lake, in the summer time, with tiki torches and live music and hot dogs!  You should come out!  Really!

Gothic Funk: Not just for funky goths.

As it turns out this isn’t just a literature-only journal.  Submissions are entered in three categories: Images, Sounds, and Words, so not only do you have a collection of (in this case seven) brilliant poems, short stories, and creative non-fiction, but you’ll also find paintings, photographs, songs, and, in this issue, a costume.

Presenting artists are: Elisabeth Blair, Katrina Blasingame, Elizabeth Bowman, Spencer Dew, Dion Mindykowski, Cecilia Pinto and Megan Williamson, Luka Vardiashvili, and Richard Whaling.

The complete list of artists published in issue #2 is: Elisabeth Blair, Katrina Blasingame, Elizabeth Bowman, Brian Chih-Chiang Lo, Spencer Dew, Meridith Halsey, Sally Hartzell, Alex Lippard and Roger Sprau, Sean Mahoney, Dion Mindykowski, Nova Moturba, Cecilia Pinto and Megan Williamson, Jasmine Robinson, Kamila Rymajdo, and Sonette Steyn, Richard Whaling, and Susan Widdicombe.

$10 gets you in, a meal (pop, hot dog (meat or veggie), and chips, and a copy of the issue #2 CD-ROM.  For an additional $5 there’ll be copies of issue #1 while supplies last, and, well, more details and RSVP at gothicfunk.org.