Last sentences

I started this blog talking about Stanley Fish's book, How to Write a Sentence, and here we are again.

Here are the last sentences that I have collected to discuss:


From Fight Club, by Chuck Palahniuk:

Being tired isn't the same as being rich, but most times it's close enough.

From A Complicated Kindness, by Miriam Toews:

Truthfully, this story ends with me still sitting on the floor of my room wondering who I'll become when I leave this town and remembering when I was a little kid and how I loved to fall asleep in my bed breathing in the smell of freshly cut grass and listening to the voices of my sister and my mother talking and laughing in the kitchen and the sounds of my dad poking around in the yard, making things beautiful right outside my bedroom window. 

From Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallow, J.K. Rowling:

All was well. 

To Self Publish or not to Self Publish, That is the Question.

This weekend, I had the pleasure of creating a Zine with some of my Creative Writing comrades for a school event that is coming up. At some point in the afternoon, the question of self-publishing was brought up, when one of the lovely ladies that was helping with the zine asked me if I thought it was worth her time to publish a collection of poems that she had been working on through Amazon.com and their new independent self-publishing initiatives.

This is really a hard question to answer for someone because it totally depends on intent. There is a stigma that goes with self-publishing (the idea that the work, in question, is not good enough to be published) that makes some writers stick their noses up at the idea. I regrettably have been one of these sorts of writers in the past. The truth is, that my own snobbery in this department came from some ignorance about what self-publishing really means.

There are so many ways to publish things now that make copyright complicated if you are ever planning to have your work published by a "legitimate" publisher. This question of self-publishing has created a sort of tug-of-war between big publishing and independent publishers. Writers want their work to be legitimate but they also want to get their stuff out there. (In the case of my friend, she wants to be done with that group of poems and create a book as an end marker of the way that she used to write, in order to make way for her writing in the future. Which seems to me like a perfectly logical reason to choose to self-publish something.)

Here we are, creating a zine for an event and talking about self-publishing, but the two things are somehow disconnected in the discussion. Making zines is a form of self-publishing. It is making art that enhances and enriches the text. It is, in my opinion, fun and communal and worthwhile.

There is still a part of me that cringes at Amazon's independent publishing directives. It is the squishy-hippy part of me that wonders why a person would want to self-publish something in order to have it look like it was published by one of the big name publishers. Self-publishing to me is about making something beautiful and different. When I look at Amazon's CreateSpace page it is all about marketing and not about art, which is where I think the problem is. It doesn't feel like it is about sticking it to the man, it feels like trying to be the man, and that is something I have never been interested in.

Getting back to the question of whether I think my friend should publish her collection of poems through Amazon's CreateSpace, I have a complicated answer and some questions:

Yes, I think that if a writer feels like something is finished and wants to self publish it as an end-marker of a time or for any other reason, he or she should do that. That is to say, if he or she has no desire to publish them elsewhere (because first publishing rights blah-de-blah).

As far as using Amazon, I have feelings about giving money to massive corporations that are obliterating independent markets and book chains, and none of them are good. (something something I don't shop at Walmart?)

The questions that I am left with are these: Who is your audience? Amazon is looking to help the self-publishing authors sell themselves, so, how likely are the people that shop on Amazon going to buy poetry? How likely is it that online customers are going to buy a book of poetry by someone they haven't heard of? If it isn't about selling, why use Amazon?

All that said, here are some excerpts from the Zine, for your viewing pleasure: