My 5 favorite stories -- April 2024 edition
UPDATE: For the time being, my plan is to send out 1-2 newsletters a month, including my monthly roundup of best writing-related (and other) stories. I’m also recording new episodes of the podcast for season 4, which will be coming out this summer. In the meantime, I appreciate your continued support of this newsletter! xxP
Here are some of the stories I found most compelling over the past couple of months…
The Trials of the Century
After the news of O.J. Simpson’s death on April 10th, I decided to watch the 5-part documentary “O.J.: Made in America.” Partly it’s because I was living outside the U.S. during Simpson’s infamous 1995 trial and missed most of its most iconic moments.
Originally created for ESPN’s 30 for 30 series in 2016 by director Ezra Edelman, O.J.: Made in America is simply one of the best documentaries I’ve ever watched.
For one thing, it’s monumental in the way that great art can be. (Think Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah or Sol LeWitt’s building-wide wall paintings). As grim as some of the material can be, there’s something thrilling about watching as Edelman and his team take their time to build several important storylines over 8 hours.
It’s documentary as braided essay.
For example: there’s a lot of time devoted to exploring who Simpson was and what he represented before the infamous 1995 trial. His was a once-in-a-generation talent, and watching him rocket down the field while with USC (later the Buffalo Bills), feinting right and left, with most of the rest of the field left in his wake, is to feel a sense of shock that someone who became such a caricature of himself could have once been such a magnetic presence.
More crucially, the 2016 documentary spends much of the first two episodes exploring the intersection of race and policing in LA. By carefully reviewing several stories that fueled African-American grief and rage—not just the Rodney King beating or the 1992 riots, but incidents like the 1979 police shooting of Eula Love and the 1991 killing of teenage Latasha Harlins by a Korean grocer—the documentary depicts the profoundly different realities that eventually led to profoundly different readings of the trial and its verdict.
In some ways, the series feels to me like an artifact of a (slightly) earlier time. One area in which it falls short is in exploring domestic violence as a societal issue—something that could be traced with the same care and insight that the filmmakers bring to race in LA, for example.
In other ways though it’s eerily prescient. Beyond the uncanny parallels of Simpson and the current Trump trial, there’s a reminder, be it Gaza/Israel or the Red State/Blue State culture wars—that we’re constantly being jostled by competing worldviews.
Finally, in the wake of #MeToo, the documentary is a potent reminder of how fame, money, and looks continue to mask the behavior of violent or predatory men even today.
Watch O.J.: Made In America on Netflix
How to figure out what your book is really about
Ever since I started teaching nonfiction back in 2005, I’ve relished Vivian Gornick’s insight, from The Situation and the Story, that inside every great memoir you find not only a vivid “situation” (or plot), but also a compelling “story.” By which she means: “the emotional experience that preoccupies the writer: the insight, the wisdom, the thing one has come to say.”
Having this piece of wisdom, this central insight, is precisely what helps lend shapeliness and urgency to memoir.
Back in Feburary, Dinty Moore published a wonderful post that reimagined Gornick’s “story” as a great “invisible magnetic river” that flows through your story, twisting and turning here and there, cutting deeper in places and shallower in others, but always propelling the reader forward. As he wrote,
“These rivers are tightly connected to the specific and complex questions we are asking about our own experiences (in memoir) or what our main characters fervently desire (in memoir and fiction.) Rivers are currents of emotion, not ‘interpretation’ or ‘the moral of the story.’”
So the question arises: how do you find your story, or your “invisible magnetic river”?
The key to that is right in Moore’s definition of the river as a current of emotion. What does the main character in your novel or memoir want, need, desire most?
In a Craft Talk Zoom, Moore built on his argument, posing a series of questions that authors can ask themselves, questions that tease out the central emotions which animate our memoir or novel. So the first step to figuring out your story is to know that you’re looking for it.
A second step is to accept that the underlying wisdom or river of a story can take time to fully come into focus…that it is a question of trial and error…in other words, it’s the work of revision. Or as Moore writes: “write from the heart, and…trust [the river] will appear.”
Can Writers Still Make a Living Writing?
Over at LitHub, Alyssa Quart kicked off the first of a projected six-part series about what they’re calling “The Myth of the Middle Class Writer.” She points out that in a 2022 Authors Guild survey, the median gross pre-tax income of full-time established authors was $25,000. In 1989? It was $23,000.
Why should writers’ incomes have failed even to keep up with inflation—let alone provide anything remotely akin to a livable wage? Quart lays blame at the way writing is perceived to be a hobby rather than skilled work. And while once upon a time “doing what you love” was somewhat fairly compensated
…Today, however, writers are often encouraged to work for exposure, or to think of low pay and lack of job security as a supposedly fair exchange for not being bored out of our skulls—yet another hat trick of neoliberalism, where the more work provides actual meaning in people’s lives, the more it’s denigrated as hobby or vanity project, which makes it easier to keep labor costs down across the board.”
Meanwhile, this month Harper’s magazine published a more consequential story about the fate of writers toiling in Hollywood post-strike.
On one hand, the piece is a detailed look at many of the issues that drove the strike — mini-writer’s room, lack of residuals in streaming, the question of AI in screenplays, etc.
But the piece takes a much broader look at why the model for writers (one that has ballooned and contracted over the past near-century) may finally be really broken.
Read “Cutting Class: The Myth of the Middle Class Writer” (LitHub)
Read “The Life and Death of Hollywood” (Harpers)
The Demise of the Small Press Distribution
It’s not just professional writing careers that feel threatened. As you may’ve heard already, this month also saw the demise of Small Press Distribution (SPD), the primary distributor for literary presses in this country.
Unless you yourself worked for, or owned, a small press you (like me) may’ve had no idea what the SPD was…or what it’s collapse means to the literary ecosphere.
But it turns out that for the past 55 years, the SPD had distributed books—fulfilling online orders to bookstores and libraries—for over 400 independent publishers. Originally started in the back of a Bay Area bookstore, the small nonprofit helped authors whose books won hundreds of major awards, including the National Book Award, Pulitzer Prize, Lambda Literary, PEN Awards and many others.
The news appeared bad on several levels. For one, small presses were being told they couldn’t collect money owed for book and would have to pay to get their books back. This threatened the financial viability of some.
Moreover, the sudden news left many presses scrambling for distribution at a time when many literary authors depend on these presses to publish their books, as a LitHub story pointed out:
Distribution isn’t exactly sexy, but …[w]ithout distribution, the books you want to read (or that you don’t yet know you want to read but may discover in an independent bookstore) will have a harder time getting into your hands. The harder that gets for anybody outside the major publishing groups, the fewer options we’ll have as readers for where to get our books, and as writers for where we can get our work published.
But the demise of the SPD may portend bigger changes ahead for small presses—at least, that’s a major insight in a fascinating (but long-and-thus-hard-to-summarize) deep dive by publisher
, who argues that these presses need to radically rethink both their mission and distribution practices.For now…the demise of the SPD is one more indicator, as if it were needed, that publishing may be heading toward some much-needed changes.
Read “The Small Press World is About to Fall Apart.” On the Collapse of Small Press Distribution” (LitHub)
Read Brooke Warner’s “Distribution: The Most Misunderstood Topic in Book Publishing.”
On a brighter note…
Lastly, this month the Twitter/X thread I kept coming back to was this one on remembering to stay true to one’s real writing purpose: