Welcome to Literary Ashland

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I’m glad I got to learn more about Ashland Creek Press in this class. I had heard about her press from her travel writing workshop, and it was mentioned before in class, but no discussion ever got in depth. Now I am very excited about it. I thought it was just going to be another small press, but it is very unique. I’m confident Ashland Creek Press is going to do very well. It seems to have a solid foundation, and I think it is in the right place at the right time. I also found it interesting to learn that they have another small press called Byte Level Books, which is also very unique.

The one thing the Midge Raymond and John Yunker presented, which I had no idea existed, were book trailers. Even now that I know a little bit more about them, I still do not understand why a book needs a video trailer. The idea was and still is a foreign idea to me. However, the idea of book trailers made me wonder how hard authors find creating them. I mean summing up an entire book can be hard enough but to mold it into a two minute visual and auditory presentation? I don’t see the sense in it.

That said I thought Dennis Cass’s book trailer “Book Launch 2.0” was brilliant. I think I found it funny because that is the type of phone call seems to ring true. I could have a very similar phone call one day. It was just hilarious and I think the trailer did a wonderful job promoting him as an author.

Midge’s and John’s book trailer for The Tourist Trail and Forgetting English was pretty brilliant as well. Even though it’s not high quality, movie budget video I think that is more of a benefit than a drawback. I think it allows potential readers/audience members to connect with the authors and become more interested in viewing their work because it’s the type of video that they could have produced. I think their video makes them as authors more accessible to their audience because they feel like real people.

After class I decided to check out a few more book trailers. I looked at Jenna Blum’s book trailer for The Stormchasers (recommended by Midge in her blog) and Brian Rathbone’s trailer for The Dawning of Power. Rathbone’s trailer was all right. It had a dramatic feel, and I became somewhat interested in learning more about the book but that feeling wasn’t strong enough to get me to go check out his book on Amazon. Blum’s trailer, on the other hand, I thought was very good. It was very visual, and the questions from the video, and the hinting at what the story might be about while not giving anything away was well done. I was definitely intrigued enough to check out her book from her website.

On a side note, I just wanted to put out there that George R.R. Martin, a pretty popular fantasy writer, has an article/speech on his website called “Editors: The Writer’s Natural Enemy.” He wrote the speech in 1979, but I think its theme is still applicable today. It’s a bit humorous but I think looking at editors from his view gives us another piece to the larger publisher, editor, writer perspective that we have gained throughout the class.

[Editor’s note: Here is the trailer for The Tourist Trail. Enjoy.]

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I found the guest speaker’s discussion on Monday to be both enjoyable and highly informative.  I appreciated all the resources Melissa Michaels presented to us–the books and websites she talked about, including the AP Stylebook, Roget’s International Thesaurus, and Copyediting: a Practical Guide, and Lynda.com will all prove useful to English and Writing majors, and I think particularly valuable to me: I am interested in pursuing copy writing as a career, and these books and website will help me to continue my education in writing after I graduate. 

The speaker’s discussion of website design and web copy also resonated with me.  As the majority of copy is now written online, I appreciated her lengthy discussion of web copy.  Both web copy and website design are interests of mine.  To get ahead in the area of website design, I am planning to attend Rogue Community College next year and earn either a Certificate in Web Design or an AAS in Web Development–if I decide to follow the latter course of study, I will be at RCC for two more years, but the skills I will learn there will be highly valuable.  I will learn to use a variety of Adobe programs, including InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator and Dreamweaver.

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A few weeks ago, I went to Midge Raymond’s interesting workshop on travel writing at the Ashland Public Library. Among other things, she pointed out the importance of dialogue and noted that people might skip over long descriptive passages in fiction but they never skip the dialogue.

I’ve been trying to draw some parallels between narrative writing and expository/argumentative writing, so her comment caused me to think about the role of quotes. I confessed to my Advanced Composition class that I sometimes skip long block quotes in scholarly books and academic articles, and I found that some of them did also.

We talked about how quotes and papers are different from dialogue and narrative, and one student, David Brown, came up with an observation that gets to the heart of the difference. Quotes in academic papers, he pointed out, take you outside of the voice of the writer, while dialogue in fiction drives the narrative forward by providing voice to characters. This makes a lot of sense I think, and the familiar “quote sandwich” format of academic writing usually provides plenty of information in the framing and contextualizing of the quote.

In the History of Publishing class, we were talking about the difference between magazine covers and book covers. It became apparent that the hardback book covers are generally less sensational and less busy than magazine covers. The busyness of magazine covers makes sense because they have a lot of varied content to highlight. But what about the sensationalism? Leroy Fulwiler pointed out that this may be because of the shorter shelf life of a magazine. Perhaps magazines have to compete harder for eyeballs because buying or even picking up a magazine is a less intentional action then buying the book or committing the time to read a book.

I need to learn more about how cover artist changed over time and the difference between paperback covers and hardcovers and the differences from genre to genre.

One last interesting tidbit from the Advanced Composition class. We were looking at the different things that happen in a paragraph – making claims, giving reasons, providing evidence, etc. It became clear that as you move from an academic style to a more journalistic style, interpretation of a sentence might change. In a more expansive and documented academic style, a particular paraphrase, summary, or quote might be seen as evidence for a larger claim. In a shorter and less documented journalistic style, that same paraphrased summary or quote might come across as a mere assertion or claim. This shift is something everyone should watch out for.

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Here are the pages I showed from the Electronic Literature Organization; the Electronic Poetry Center at SUNY Buffalo; Netpoetic, ‘a space, a net workshop’ curated by Jason Nelson and Davin Heckman; Writing Digital Media, a wiki hosted at Brown University; and our guest poet, the e-poetry of Ian Hatcher.

The eMDA degree program (minor in Emerging Media & Digital Arts) is here.