An Interview with Laura Stanfill, publisher of Forest Avenue Press

Posted on August 15, 2017 by Ed Battistella
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Portland’s Forest Avenue Press has a unique community mission aimed at empowering authors and publishing page-turning literary fiction. Publisher Laura Stanfill serves on the PubWest Board of Directors and on the advisory board of Atelier26.

EB: How did Forest Avenue Press get started? And what have you learned in the last few years?

LS: I founded the press in 2012 to publish and promote Oregon writers, then opened to national submissions in 2014.

In the past five years, I’ve learned a lot about the industry and have dedicated myself to teaching and mentoring other publishers and writers through volunteer work, speaking gigs, and PubWest, where I serve on the board.

One of my biggest passion topics is distribution. How a press gets its books into the marketplace matters because of visibility and sales. Some distribution models are more effective and far-reaching than others. If authors go into a publishing contract truly understanding how their books will be sent into the world, they’ll be more effective advocates for their art.

I spent two years selling books out of the back of my car—and toting boxes to bookstores for consignment—before signing with Legato Publishers Group, an affiliate of distributor-heavyweight PGW, now owned by Ingram. We have sales conferences and reps that sell our books in across the U.S., which makes our marketing and publicity efforts even more crucial, because the risk is higher. But the potential reward is higher, too.

EB: Is Portland especially hospitable to independent publishers and writers?

LS: I don’t think I would have decided to start a press in another city. Portland’s literary community inspired me to build one more home for novelists, and its publishers made me believe that I could actually do it through their examples, advice, and encouragement. We celebrate each other, honor others’ accomplishments, connect and turn out in huge numbers for book events.

We also have incredibly dedicated booksellers who write excellent shelf talkers and hand-sell local titles to browsers. When I showed up as a new publisher, I found friends and allies in the indie bookstore world because I had been buying books and attending events for a decade. My mission with Forest Avenue was to urge in-person conversations about literature, so I created an events-based marketing plan that I still use today. My whole business model is centered on independent bookstores. I support bookstores; bookstores support our authors. It sounds obvious, but it’s important. Essential.

I should add that I just found out I’m a Publishers Weekly Star Watch Top 45 honoree; Rosanne Parry, a local author and Annie Bloom’s bookseller, nominated me for the award, which recognizes up-and-coming publishers. She took the time away from her own writing, bookselling, and family life to ask the panel to consider me. I’m so grateful. Moments like this continue to motivate me to do my part to uplift and amplify others in the literary community.

EB: Tell us a little about your background?

LS: My background is in community journalism; before transitioning to publishing, I was managing editor of a weekly on the Oregon coast, covering education and business beats and managing a five-person newsroom. I’ve won numerous journalism awards, including the Consumer Issues Reporting Award from the Oregon Department of Justice. I also worked in public relations and manuscript editing.

EB: Forest Avenue Press is also the home of the Main Street Writers Movement. What that?

LS: It’s a movement geared to encouraging writers to build community at the local level by supporting each other, their indie bookstores, and local presses and magazines. If we can create these invested hubs of community goodness, then the whole national literary ecosystem will become stronger. And touring writers will be able to activate Main Street communities in the places they travel.

It’s easy to join. Take the pledge—http://www.forestavenuepress.com/take-the-pledge—and then look around and see what you can do to genuinely support the authors in your community. We use #mainstreetwriters as our hashtag to help members find each other.

Being genuine is an important piece of this movement; if a friend’s book isn’t to your taste, don’t write a chirpy false review. You can still support your friend in genuine ways: show up at an event, share a link to an interview, or take a few photos to share on social media. I run a not-quite-monthly newsletter with links and information about community building, and signing the pledge will add you to that list.

EB: Many of your book seem to have a Portland connection, like City of Weird and A Simplified Map of the Real World by Stevan Allred. What do you look for in a book?

LS: When we signed with Legato and went national with submissions, I knew I wanted to continue promoting Northwest writers, so our catalog is a blend of regional writers and national ones; we have books set in Portland, Seattle, and Alaska, but also the Philippines, New Orleans, and Delaware.

I have a committee help me choose titles when we’re open for submissions; we love literary language, page-turning plots, and diversity, and we’re also partial to magical realism. There’s often a joyous, ebullient quality to our titles, whether due to the playfulness of the language or the wild ride of the story itself. Our tagline is “Literary fiction on a joyride.”

EB: What do you look for in an author?

LS: I look for someone who has been actively building community, because it’s really hard to sell books by authors who are only invested in promoting their own work. Debut authors are a favorite, because so many of them have spent years honing their craft, and it’s a huge honor to launch an author’s first title.

I love working with authors who have a strong sense of their own craft and want to work together with our team to get the book to reach its full potential. That kind of collaborative spirit is essential.

EB: Let me ask about independent publishing more generally. How do you see the role of independent publishers like Forest Avenue in American book culture? What does the future hold?

LS: There are many amazing presses doing great work, putting out worthy titles that deserve a place on the shelf. I visited the giant Ingram warehouse in Tennessee last fall, and instead of panicking at the number of books, I left feeling ever-so-satisfied and a bit giddy. Publishers are making books, and readers are choosing them, and that allows us to make more books.

As far as the future of the industry, margins are tight in this business, and that’s a concern. So many people tell me, “I don’t have time to read,” because of busy lives and/or choosing other forms of entertainment. There’s a gap between the number of people out there hoping to find a publisher and the number of readers actually buying books. Writers have to be readers too for this system to succeed, for existing presses to flourish and for new ones to get a strong start. That’s really why I’m so invested in community building.

EB: What advice have you got for potential authors?

LS: Read widely. Show up on the local literary scene by attending events and buying books from indies. Checking titles out from the library—or requesting a title that isn’t in the system yet—are wonderful ways to support the publishers you hope may publish you. Build a brand and a social media presence, but not at the expense of the work. The work—the words—must come first. And when you have a book deal, and are making that leap from potential to actual product, find other writers with similar projects or pub dates, and befriend them. You’ll celebrate together and commiserate together, as needed. My authors Renee Macalino Rutledge and Michael Shou-Yung Shum are both in the ’17 Scribes, an international debut author collective that’s been doing impressive work promoting 2017 debut novels.

EB: Where can readers get your books?

LS: At independent bookstores across the country. If a backlist title isn’t in stock any more, you can ask a bookseller to order it. You can find them online as well, but we’re strongly commmitted to having our readers support their local indies.

EB: Thanks for talking with us.

LS: Thank you for the opportunity.

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An Interview with John McWhorter, author of Talking Back, Talking Black

Posted on July 18, 2017 by Ed Battistella
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photo by Eileen Barroso

John McWhorter teaches linguistics, Western civilization, music history, and American studies at Columbia University. A New York Times best-selling author and TED speaker, he is a columnist for Time and regular contributor to the Atlantic, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post and the host of Slate’s Lexicon Valley. His books on language include The Power of Babel, Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue, What Language Is, The Language Hoax, and Words on the Move.

John McWhorter earned his B.A. from Rutgers University, his M.A. from New York University, and his Ph.D. in Linguistics from Stanford University.

We talk about his latest book, Talking Back, Talking Black: Truths About America’s Lingua Franca.

EB: Thanks for writing this book. You’ve managed to show both the complexity of African American Vernacular and the complexity of the issues surrounding public attitudes about vernacular language and correctness. As writer, how did you choose the material to discuss—which goes far beyond the usual textbook treatment?

JM: What moved me was two things – 1) that I don’t think we linguists have made a dent in the public’s reception of the dialect in pointing out that it is systematic in its grammar (and I really mean “we,” as I wrote a book on Black English in the 90s and have written on it fairly often since), and 2) that I don’t think racism is the only thing keeping people from understanding.

So, I decided to approach Black English from the perspective I have seen laymen to have, rather than trying to give them a kind of “Linguistics 101,” which is the foundation of the “systematicity” argument – you’ve taken some phonology and syntax and you want to talk about GRAMMAR, but the public hasn’t had those courses and can’t hear what you’re saying in any real way. I gathered the kinds of questions the public usually has and frankly, the misimpressions they often so earnestly insist upon (that Black is “minstrel,” that there’s no such thing as a black “sound” except that black men have deep voices, and so on) and address them head on. That meant showing how the dialect is COMPLICATED, not just “systematic,” addressing what minstrel speech actually was and how there was a delicate, but real, intersection between that and how black people in the nineteenth century actually spoke, and also getting at something that we linguists can forget that the general public in America does not readily understand: diglossia. Most laymen think you speak one way, and that how you talk in your kitchen signifies how you talk when giving a speech. I’m not sure there is a pop source that teaches the public what diglossia is and how common – even universal – it is in how people speak. I tried to help out with that.

EB: I was particularly fascinated by the intimacy marker up, as in your example “We was sittin’ up at Tony’,” which I had heard used but never understood before. When did you first figure out the nuance to that?

JM: I’m not sure when that occurred to me, actually – sometime in the 90s, I think – probably in 1999 when the person I mentioned said “There was buck naked people up in my house.” That person was, as it happens, a white guy doing a fond kind of imitation of black speech (in the vein today often called appropriation although, as I have written, I find that analysis strained when it comes to speech). I was struck that his mimicking was good enough that he used that “up” – it struck me as especially authentic and then the “linguist hat” goes on and I thought “He is using that UP spontaneously but really, what is the function of it?”

I always have my ear cocked to vernacular constructions and am always trying to figure them out – I think it’s part of my being first, hardwired to be a linguist sort and second, black, such that I grew up hearing a certain variety of speech styles. An example would be that, as I describe in the book, when I was a kid and heard my cousins using the narrative HAD, my natural impulse was to quietly try to figure out how that usage made SENSE, rather than just dismissing it as “slang” that “they” use.

EB: What the significance of the title? I have to admit, when I mention the book to people I have to stop and think about the order of the words BACK and BLACK.

JM: Honestly the publisher thought that one up and I have rarely given it much thought! I had a different title – “How Do You Sound Black and Why?” That probably wasn’t good enough – book titles don’t come easily to me.

EB: You also describe Black English as America’s Lingua Franca. What do you mean by that?

JM: That since the nineties especially, ASPECTS of Black English have become a part of the speech repertoire of people beyond black America. First, Latinos, but now even many Asians and finally whites, especially young men. Pragmatic markers (yo, naw for no, etc.), aspects of inflection, and associated gestures are now so embraced by such a wide variety of people that to many young people the idea of Black English as specifically “black” sounds off. Now, as a linguist I specify that it isn’t that people beyond blacks (and Latinos) are actually using the full blown phonology and syntax of Black English. However, a lot of white kids, using a certain amount of the slang and intonation, consider themselves to be using “Black English,” which was all but unheard of until the 90s. It’s been part of the browning of the culture, as some have called it.

EB: Why do you think Black English is so difficult for Americans—Black and White—to wrap their heads around? Because of the complexity of race or the obscurity of linguistics, or both?

JM: Obviously both, but I honestly believe that the linguistic aspect dominates. It rankles some for me to say that – our moment encourages academics to stress racism over all, and at times that’s necessary. But the general public finds rural white Southern speech quite absurd, often, as well, and if there had ever been a push to use it as a teaching tool Fox News would have had a grand old time with that as well. Americans, because English is RELATIVELY homogenous here compared to England where it has had longer to differentiate, have a hard time processing that English can come in assorted flavors and still be legitimate. There is also an Anglophone First World bourgeois obsession with grammatical “correctness” in general – people are quite vicious about supposed grammatical errors. Does the viciousness step up some when black speech is involved? Perhaps, the race part is, in itself, just one part.

EB: Are there some common misconceptions about Black English shared by Black and White speakers?

JM: Certainly. Most people think Black English means slang, which makes any discussion of its “legitimacy” seem absurd. Linguists talk about the grammar of the dialect, but to laymen, “grammar” is a matter of things people do WRONG, not all of the complex ways that we put words together otherwise. So Black English seems to be slang and mistakes to most.

EB: You mention the Blaccent, as your call it, and that there are several different levels of the African American accent. Can you tell our readers a little about that?

JM: Most black Americans have vowel colorings that are subtly different than other Americans’, which is much of what we hear as the “black sound.” Then, some black people do not have those colorings, but still produce their speech with a slightly different “timbre,” in the sense we usually use re singers, than others. That signals another aspect of the black “sound.” These differences are internalized quite subconsciously from infancy on, and have nothing to do with right or wrong, anymore than the different vocal “placement” of British English is. I was struck by how absent from public writings this interesting aspect of black speech is beyond a certain point, and one of the things I most wanted to get across in this book was that there IS a such thing as sounding black and that there’s nothing wrong with it in any way. If the book leaves any shred of difference in public perception I hope it is that.

EB: Thanks for talking with us. Congratulations on a fine book.

JM: Thank you!

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My Dinner with Harlan

Posted on July 15, 2017 by Ed Battistella
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When I was in high school two of my favorite books were Harlan Ellison’s The Glass Teat: Essays of Opinion on Television and The Other Glass Teat. They were feisty books of cultural criticism based on Ellison’s weekly column for the Los Angeles Free Press in the late 1960s. The title vision of TV viewers fit my high school mindset (along with Herman Hesse and Franz Kafka, you know the type), and the books sent me to the dictionary every other page so I was convinced they were a serious read.

I read more Harlan Ellison, graduating to the Dangerous Visions collection and Again Dangerous Visions, with their equally abrasive introductions. I was cheering from the sidelines when Ellison wrote “City on the Edge of Forever.”

College and grad school intervened, with linguistics taking the place of speculative fiction. But I still kept an eye on Harlan’s career, enjoying a wonderful Comics Journal interview where he confesses to sliding down a conference table to deck Irwin Allen, the producer of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. Because why not.

Year later—maybe a dozen—I was surprised to learn that Harlan Ellison would be speaking at the university where I was teaching—the University of Alabama in Birmingham His visit was cosponsored by the Honors Program and Ada Long, the chain smoking honors director, was looking for an English professor to chaperone (as it were) the honors students who would go to dinner with Harlan after his talk. As it turned out, of the 25 or so English professors in the department, I was the only would who would admit to knowing who Harlan Ellison was, so it was on me.

The dinner, which included Harlan, my wife and me, and a half dozen students went pretty much as you might expect. Harlan argued with the students about just about everything. I sat at the far end, sipping a beer and keeping my head down. I remembered the story about Irwin Allen.

After dinner as we walked back to the cars, we heard a shout and saw a man running with a purse. The students took off after the purse snatcher, and I took off after the students. It turned out that the runner with the purse was trying to return it to a woman who’d left it behind in a restaurant.

We got back to Harlan, who was waiting with my wife, and shaking his head ever so slightly. I never asked why, but I always imagined that we had all expected something dramatic to happen at a dinner with Harlan Ellison—a crime, a brawl, the apocalypse, whatever. Harlan, it seemed, knew better.

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What People Are Reading This Summer

Posted on June 19, 2017 by Ed Battistella
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It’s almost summer and graduating students get a little time to finally read what they want, professors have an opportunity to read things they do not have to grade, and even professional writers get some summer reading in the extra daylight.

It’s been an exciting year for books in southern Oregon—James Anderson’s The Never-Open Desert Diner and Midge Raymond’s My Last Continent came out in paperback, Macmillan released Victor Lodato’s Edgar & Lucy and Sandra Scofield gave us Swim: Stories of the Sixties.

For those of you who have been falling behind on your reading, those are all great choices for the summer.

Also on my list are Kory Stamper’s Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries, John McWhorter’s Talking Back Talking Black, Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run, Brian Doyle’s Chicago, and Andre Dubus III’s House of Sand and Fog.

What are others looking forward to?

Tod Davies says she is “Rereading everything I can get my hands on by Margaret Atwood and Ursula K. LeGuin.” She also plans on catching up with on Neil Gaiman’s books and is going to reread Lewis Mumford’s Technics and Civilization.

Diana Maltz too is planning to read everything she can by Margaret Atwood to choose novels for the single-author class in the fall. “It might,” she says, “be a grim summer.”

Allegra Lance, soon to be in grad school at PSU says she is hunting down a copy of The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet right now, and rereading the Tiffany Aching series, A Night in the Lonesome October, and a few other books. She also just bought Roxane Gay’s Difficult Women, The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas, and a bunch of Sarah Waters books.

Bill Gholson is going to read lots of poetry this summer, and, he adds, “I am also planning to read The Book of Joan by Lidia Yukanavitch, because “I like a good dystopian novel to take the edge off of summer happiness.” Also on Bill’s list: two novels by Don DeLillo–Falling Man and The Body Artist.

Allie Sipe is heading off to Teach for America in Rhode Island. She says: “I keep trying to read 1984, but it gets too realistically discouraging. So I switch to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy for comic relief, but I can’t seem to finish that, either. I’m also reading a short story collection full of iconic authors to try and narrow down the list of authors I probably should have read as an English major but somehow never did.”

Alma Rosa Alvarez says she is planning on reading some books connected to her teaching, like Colson Whitehead’s Underground Railroad and Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Refugees but is also planning to finish Amy Stewart’s The Earth Moved: On the Remarkable Achievements of Earthworms.

Dante Fumagalli writes that “It feels pretentious to say almost, but I’ve been trying to read Infinite Jest on and off for a few years now, so I’m hoping to use this summer to finish that!” [Good luck!] Also on his list more by Colson Whitehead.

Nicole Eichsteadt is going to dig into The Chemist by Stephanie Meyer and Before I Fall by Lauren Oliver. And she is working on a novel of her own.

Laura Payne is planning to read Teach: Two Years in the Mississippi Delta by Michael Copperman and The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane by Lisa See. She adds: “I figure Copperman’s book will be good for me since I’m about to travel to do a couple of years of teaching away from home and I’m interested in See’s book because it has to do with tea making and I’ve been working at a specialty tea shop for about a year now. On top of that, I really want to finish Stephen King’s, It, because the movie is coming out soon and I want to geek out about it with my dad.”

Margaret Perrow is tackling Straight Man by Robert Russo, Thin Blue by Johnny Steinberg, about the unofficial ‘rules’ of policing in post-Apartheid South African townships, The Republic of Imagination by Azar Nafisi, “because she writes about the importance of literary fiction to freedom and democracy,” The Wisdom of Tich Nhat Hanh by Tich Nhat Hanh, “to slow me down and put things into perspective,” Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk by David Sedaris, because he’s funny and smart at the same time, and he knows how to ‘write short.’ And she’ll be dipping into How to Write Short by Roy Peter Clark.

What are you reading?

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