The following is an interview with Gina Frangello, author of My Sister's Continent. She is also the Executive Editor of Other Voices literary journal and their new fiction imprint OV Books. Gina lives in Chicago with her husband and three children. Her website is www.ginafrangello.com and the Other Voices website is www.othervoicesmagazine.org.
Dan:
Hello Gina. Thanks again for taking some time from what sounds like a pretty busy schedule to answer some questions.
Gina:
It’s my pleasure. Carving out time away from my two-month-old son is about as difficult as rocket science these days, but it’s refreshing to take some time to talk about literature! Of course, I’ll probably be taking several breaks to nurse—one great plus of the Internet!
Dan:
Let's start off with your writing. Your debut novel, My Sister's Continent, was published by Chiasmus Press in February. How long a process was it for you to write, get an offer, edit and so on?
Gina:
Well, this is a really complicated question when it comes to my novel, because My Sister’s Continent grew out of a series of short stories, that grew out of a much earlier attempt at a novel. The short answer is that the novel took four years to write—but the longer, more accurate answer is that I began writing about Kirby and Kendra in 1993, thirteen years before My Sister’s Continent’s release. In the earliest version of their story, they were fraternal twins and it was a very Gen X kind of novel, full of their twentysomething friends and all these subplots about the Chicago bar and café culture. Kendra was a struggling writer—Kirby’s fiancé, Aris, owned a café. The sisters’ parents were more minor characters, although the sexual abuse storyline was actually much more explicit and black and white in that version. Michael Kelsey was a smaller character too, and his ex-wife and daughter never made an appearance in that story. That novel, which was called Angry Words, never really left my drawer, but it did convince me to defect from my budding career as a therapist—I was working in New Hampshire and Vermont at the time with battered women and foster girls with abuse histories—and instead to go to graduate school for creative writing. I started the novel the year I got married, and the following year my husband and I moved back to Chicago, where I’d grown up, and I started the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago
A couple of years later, I started writing a series of stories about Kendra and Michael. Most were in first person from Kendra’s point of view, and a few were third person from Michael’s perspective. In these stories, Kirby was a minor player, rarely mentioned. I think she only makes an appearance in one of the published stories. In it, she’s already out as a lesbian and living with her girlfriend. I wrote quite a few of these stories and published at least 5 of them in magazines . . . but the problem was that when I tried to compile them into a novel-in-stories, they felt a little claustrophobic. Kendra’s voice was just too intense—it worked for a short story, but not something book length.
Then in the late 90’s, I was teaching lit at UIC and I devised a class that would draw on my previous background in psychology—I called it “The Hysterics in Literature.” In that class, we read Freud’s “Dora” case study, Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, as the introductory “novella,” and went on to talk about other famous hysterics, like King Lear. But when I was reading the Dora case, I was so blown away by similarities to the short stories I’d been writing that I started conceptualizing the novel as a kind of contemporary retelling of Freud—similar to the way Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres is to King Lear. Instead of trying to compile the stories, I started from scratch, and chose Kirby as the overarching narrator, because I thought she would be a more approachable “guide” for the reader.
The publishing question is a whole other one. I found an agent in 2002, a really funny, smart agent whom I adored and who was having great successes with other clients, but he couldn’t sell my book. Editors kept freaking out. One, at Houghton-Mifflin, allegedly told him, “I had to keep putting this novel down and leaving the room, it was so disturbing.” Another editor said, “I couldn’t explain this novel to a marketing rep without blushing or breaking down.” A couple of editors at the more literary big houses tried to champion the novel, but were always overruled by higher-ups. So the writing seemed on the wall that MSC wasn’t a mainstream novel—or that at the very least the corporate publishing world didn’t want it to be one—but my agent wasn’t interested in submitting to the independents. A lot of agents aren’t because there’s no money in it, and distribution is small, and publicity can be nearly nonexistent. My agent wanted me to write a new novel, and figured once we sold that, we’d return to My Sister’s Continent. I went along with his plan—but in 2005 his agency dissolved and I was suddenly faced with having to look for new representation. Instead of sending My Sister’s Continent to agents all over again, I sent it to three independent publishers, one of which was Chiasmus. It was accepted within the week.
Dan:
With all the indie presses out there, how did you decide to submit to Chiasmus?
Gina:
I knew of Chiasmus because Lidia Yuknavitch, the founder, used to run a magazine called two girls review, and they’d published one of the Kendra stories in the late ‘90’s. At that time, Lidia was also one of the editors at FC2, a press I admired and where a lot of my friends were publishing. When Lidia founded Chiasmus, I heard about it from my good friend and former writing professor Cris Mazza. Lidia was publishing one of Cris’ novels, and Cris suggested I send her mine too, and said that Lidia was a big fan of my work. But at that time I was towing my agent’s line and not sending the novel out myself, much less to start-up indies, so I just kind of buried my head in the sand and didn’t do anything. But I always had Chiasmus in the back of my mind, mainly because I knew Lidia had actually read the Dora case. I knew this because she published an experimental short story about Dora in FC2’s “Chick-Lit” anthology, which Cris had edited. So really, where else in the world would I possibly have found an editor who had not only read this Freud case study, but dug it so much she wrote her own story about it? But even with this knowledge, and even though I’d respected Lidia’s avant-garde aesthetic for years, I didn’t send to her until I no longer had an agent. I specify this because, as much as I loved my agent, I think there are a lot of young writers out there who have these illusions that they’re going to make a million bucks and become famous, and if they have agents that illusion can become even more heightened because it’s an agent’s job to want that for his or her clients—without that as the goal, agents couldn’t survive, really. But the truth is, we can’t all be interviewed with a big ass photo spread in Vanity Fair. Especially if we’re writing darker, edgier, more cerebral work, the chances of that are actually very slim. So that I had this editor out there who already knew my work, who was familiar with Dora, and I was coming recommended by a writer she was already publishing—and yet I didn’t send my book to her for over a year—seems kind of absurd now. I think it’s a cautionary tale, really. I mean, we all want a fat advance and to sell a million copies . . . but what we really all want is to be published, right? That alone is way more than most writers get. I think newer writers should explore all their opportunities, and not hold out for Dan Brown’s editor to buy them a summer house in Italy or something. You have to look out for yourself. Your agent may be great, but agents exist in a certain moneyed arena, and the indies are generally not on their radar. But the indies are really the best chance, and possibly the best outlet, period, for newer writers, and for literary writers in general these days.
Dan:
How has it been trying to promote the book, while also dealing with the aspects of having a newborn in the house (congratulations!)?
Gina:
It’s been pretty comical, I must admit. Not only was I eight months pregnant when the novel came out, but at my release party I had just been let out of the hospital for double pneumonia. When you have double pneumonia in your eighth month of pregnancy, doctors take it very seriously, to put it mildly, and so I’d been kept in the hospital for nearly a week. I’d been given so many IV’s that I gained 12 pounds of water weight—literally, I weighed 12 pounds more the day I came home than the day I’d gone in, and I’m only 5’2”, so that isn’t negligible. My legs and feet were so swollen that my daughters were like, Mommy those aren’t your legs! So none of my shoes fit me at all. I had no shoes to wear to my own release party. It was pretty much the anti-Sex-and-the-City moment. All my life, whenever I imagined having a book release party, I’d be standing there reading in some slinky little dress, feeling glamorous—and in reality, it turned out the only shoes that fit me were my mother’s pumps that she’d kept since the 1950’s. They were cool and vintage and all that, but really nobody wants to go to her book release party in her mother’s old shoes, with ankles like an elephant’s, and a residual pneumonia wheeze. By that time, the fact that I had this incredibly swollen stomach was just beside the point.
Jessa Crispin from Bookslut actually invited me to read at the Bookslut reading series I think in large part because she wanted to hear a woman read something really kinky in her 9th month of pregnancy. So it became kind of a joke. I gave a lot of local readings right before I gave birth, and I’ve done plenty since, two of which I’ve carted my son to—he slept through the first, which made me cocky, but of course he screamed through the second and my husband had to take him out and missed the reading. Chicago’s been very generous to me in terms of all the readings I’ve done here, due to my inability to travel and read anywhere else. I’m amazed there are still people coming to my readings. It’s been incredibly fun.
I’m finally going to New York in June and will read at Housing Works on June 12th. I plan to do Portland, where Chiasmus is, as well as Seattle, Los Angeles and San Francisco in the fall. Other Voices has a lot of LA editors, so I’d really love the chance to go there and read with some of my friends.
Dan:
The novel has many things going on in it, but one aspect is how is compares to Freud's case-study of Dora. It sounds like while you consciously tweaked some of the prior drafts of your work to tighten up this comparison, a great deal of the similarities were there in your earlier drafts without conscious effort. What ran through your mind when you became aware of the similarities between your contemporary work and this study that was over a century old?
Gina:
It was one of those thunderstruck moments. Here’s a text that’s about a relationship between two families that took place in 1898 Vienna, and here I was in 1998 Chicago, and there were so many similarities, conceptually and even on a basic plot level, that it was both invigorating and depressing. It was invigorating to feel connected, in a way, to something that old, that formative to the whole future of psychology—but it was depressing to realize there in cold print that so much of what it is to come of age as a woman hasn’t changed since Victorian Europe. Most people haven’t read the Dora case, of course, but the most obvious similarity is the fact that Dora was embroiled in a kind of quasi-affair with her father’s very predatory best friend, a man named Herr K. (Michael Kelsey even just happened to have a last name with the same initial.) Then there was the fact that Freud ultimately concluded that Dora’s real erotic attraction was to a woman—Frau K—while Kirby, Kendra’s twin, was a lesbian in all my early drafts. Dora had been a nanny figure to the K’s children, and Kendra and Kirby had babysat Michael Kelsey’s daughter when they were younger—both situations had been formative to the young women’s sexual outlooks. Then there was also the fact that a lot of feminist theorists have made a big ado about Dora having woken up to find her father sitting next to her bed, and in my original story cycle, Kendra had been sexually molested by her father. And Kendra as a character was full of physical symptoms that could be viewed as contemporary versions of Dora’s “hysterical” ailments, in particular her eating disorder, which really does seem to me the heir of what was once known as hysteria. There were many small, strange similarities too, but those were the biggies. If I looked at their storylines separately, neither Kirby nor Kendra was exactly like Dora . . . but when I combined them, their stories seemed to echo hers almost eerily. So my “Dora” became identical twins, each representing a facet of her personality. I think one of the darkest things about my novel is, in actuality, how very similarly laden with sexual landmines being a young woman is now to the way it was then—that these are the “eternal” facts of being female, at least up to the point in history in which we currently exist.
Dan:
Do you look at yourself as a writer, or a woman writer? Do you think a distinction ever needs to be made - especially, perhaps, in light of the recent post you entered on your blog, "Is Chick Lit the Culprit"?
Gina:
I may be wrong, but I doubt many literary fiction writers would say that we think of ourselves primarily as “women writers.” I don’t even mean that really politically, but just that I think the identity of the writer is, in the best possible scenario, beside the point when it comes to literature, and so I think that’s what many serious writers are striving for—for it not to matter who wrote the book, but to have a work of literature that speaks for itself. I don’t think a book should be viewed as more or less valid, more or less interesting, more or less challenging, more or less relevant, or more or less “marketable” even, because of who wrote it. The book always has to speak for itself. What I mean is that, if we found out tomorrow that Toni Morrison was just a front woman for some white man, and a white man had written Beloved, would that mean Beloved was no longer a Nobel Prize winning kind of novel? Sure, one could argue that a white man couldn’t write Beloved—but really, how could anyone write Beloved, at the core of it, right? It’s an unimaginable story—a story no one in the twentieth century should be able to imagine. Yes, being African-American might help that imagination, but Toni Morrison would be the first to say that Sethe’s story certainly doesn’t mirror her own. She was able to write it without having been in slavery, without ever having lived in that era. So in that sense, if by some stroke of genius a white man had written that story, it would still be the same earth-shattering book. A writer’s identity shouldn’t loan her or his work any more or less validity. Even though I’m not that interested in the Jonathan Frey controversy to begin with, the only reason it’s relevant at all is that Frey was claiming his piece was a memoir, and so his identity ostensibly counted. As a novelist, that’s another matter.
But all that said, it’s also impossible in a sexist culture not to be categorized as a woman writer, yes, in many of the ways I discussed on my blog (www.ginafrangello.blogs.com ). Marketers at the corporate publishing houses are all about what kinds of books women read vs. what kinds of books men read. Right now, chick lit has become so ingrained into the publishing community that it’s become its own whole genre, like mystery or romance. And somehow those conventions have spilled over into literary writing by women—or if it hasn’t spilled over, it’s converged with changes in the zeitgeist of literary fiction that happen to echo the rise of chick lit in some disturbing ways. What I said in my blog, among other things, is that these days, post 9/11 especially, there’s been a move away from darker, more challenging fiction in general, and that “literary” seems to be
becoming synonymous with “quiet” or “subtle” or “pretty” writing. Things that are loud and scary and maybe a little garish or brash—certain types of cutting-edge writing that would have been defined as literary in the 80’s or 90’s—has been marginalized so that it exists somewhat on the outside of literary fiction as the corporate houses are defining it—and more important, as they’re publishing it. And that this is especially true, really scarily true, for women, who are increasingly being pushed to write and publish those “plucky heroine triumphs” kind of novels that get picked for the big media book clubs.
So as a writer who doesn’t write the kinds of novels the corporate houses seem to want women to write, how is it possible to be a writer and be a woman without the two overlapping? Of course it isn’t. And in some ways, while it should be irrelevant what my gender is when judging my fiction, my gender is never irrelevant to me as a human being. Our lives are incredibly formed by gender, to the point that it may be impossible to have a non-gendered experience in the world we live in. So my experience of myself as a writer is bound up in my experience of myself as a woman, and the issues I care about as a writer are bound up in the issues I care about as a woman. I don’t think that in and of itself is harmful, so long as books are judged for what they are, not for who their writers are. But I was just interviewed for the Writer’s Chronicle by someone who seemed under the impression that women over 30, or women who aren’t gorgeous, are no longer able to even publish books at the big houses, which is preposterous of course—but there is some creepy truth to the issue of marketers being concerned with whether or not women writers look good and, using this to help market their books. Or really, worse yet, I hate the thought of an editor saying, “This isn’t what suburban women of X age group, who buy the most books, want to read,” just assuming that a man would never buy my novel because I’m a “woman writer.” Those things are really problematic.
Dan:
What, for you, was the biggest difference between writing your novel as compared to the short stories you've written over the years?
Gina:
I work with short fiction as an editor, as well as writing it, so the first thing I want to say is that I actually think short stories are harder to write than novels, from the perspective of craft. Novels, because they’re longer, can be messier and more imperfect but still beautiful and successful. Short stories really have to be more finely crafted, more skillful, to work. A short story is like walking on a tight rope. You can fall off with one false step and splat. Novels permit you a few mistakes. So I have the utmost respect for any writer who can craft an excellent short story, and those brave enough to stake their whole reputations on that form.
But for me, beyond issues of craft, the psychological difference in writing a story vs. a novel is enormous. For better or worse, I usually write a draft of a short story in one day. Maybe over two or three days. I doubt I have ever taken a week or more to write the draft of a story. I may revise it several times, even over a period of many months depending on how often I have time to work on it and how inspired I am by it, but the first draft is all there really in one long shot. With a novel, of course, that can never be true. Even writers who don’t write short fiction as quickly as other writers would no doubt say that the process is really different because of the basic issue of time. It takes (much) longer to write a novel than it does even to have a baby! Writing a novel is a serious issue of being madly in love. You’d have to have a lot of free time on your hands to write a novel without being utterly in love with it and obsessed by it—you’d have to have, effectively, nothing better to do. The truth is we all have so much else to do. What kind of craziness would possess a person to, over a period of one year or five years or ten years, return over and over again to a fictional world, to people who don’t exist, without any instant gratification? With short fiction, you write a story and it might be accepted for publication weeks or months later, and then you’re happy. With a novel, you keep returning and returning and returning. You leave the world with your spouse and kids and job and friends and whole identity in it, to keep going back to this other place, and you don’t know whether the endeavor will ever even work. You don’t know if you’ll ever finish the novel and be happy with it. You don’t know if your agent will like it—or if you’ll find an agent for it. You don’t know if anyone will ever want to publish it. Yet you still return. Writing a novel is an obsession. If you aren’t obsessed, if you ever think, Oh shit I have to go work on my novel, then why you’d do it is a mystery to me. Unless you’re Stephen King or John Grisham or whatever, writing a novel isn’t a job, it’s a labor of love. Short fiction writers have many similar issues in terms of maybe not making much (or any) money for their work, and not knowing if someone will publish the story, but in my personal experience that was much less scary to face when I’d spent a few days or weeks in the fever of another world than when I’d spent four years there. For me, writing a novel is a kind of willing surrendering of some of my sanity and identity. I’m not entirely sure I would recommend it to anyone who could avoid it, but I seem unable to avoid it so I’ve learned to love it.
Dan:
Now that you've published a novel, do you believe you'll continue writing short fiction, or just work in the longer form?
Gina:
I would desperately like to do some more stories. For starters, I just love them, and I enjoy writing them. But also, like many writers, it took me quite awhile to learn to write a successful short story, and to start publishing my work in magazines . . . and then, just when I was publishing really regularly, I kind of abandoned much of that to focus on writing two novels back to back, over a period of about seven years, with no pay-off in terms of publication until this year. Plus, I’ve been editing Other Voices so long that I think of the literary magazine arena as a kind of family now, and I would really enjoy having more work to send out, and the joy of finding a place where a story clicks and seeing it in print, all within that arena that’s so important to me as an editor. But the irony is that, when I was writing a lot of short fiction, like most writers I thought of editors of lit mags as these kind of unapproachable gatekeepers who would arbitrarily permit or deny me entrance. Now that I know a lot more about the system, and the individual magazines and their editors, and would find the process much less intimidating and more fun, I have hardly anything to send out. Hopefully that will change soon. And like a lot of writers, I have the fantasy that I can someday publish a collection of stories, even though all current publishing wisdom says collections don’t sell. We’re thumbing our noses at that at OV Books, so I dare hope some other press somewhere will want to prove it untrue with my collection, Slut Lullabies, as well.
Dan:
I mentioned earlier that you had posted something on your blog. What led you to the decision to add to your literary workload by including a blog on your website? How have your enjoyed the process of blogging, and interacting with your readers, so far?
Gina:
I’m a somewhat marginal blogger, in that “community” sense. I just don’t have a lot of time to have extensive dialogues on the site with people who post responses, so for the most part I don’t tend to respond to the responses, but just let responders get a dialogue going with one another, unless something really blows my mind, or I feel only I can address it. I’m allowing myself to view my role as a blogger primarily like that of a moderator—putting ideas out there and sparking dialogue, but then sitting back and shutting my mouth. I’ve wanted to have a blog for Other Voices for a very long time, but I already work for free (like most editors of nonprofit magazines) and obviously have kids and my own writing so I just never took the plunge. Then when my novel came out and people—by which I mainly mean my husband!—started nagging me to have a blog to help promote my novel, I took it as more of an opportunity to actually launch the OV blog. There are things on the blog about my own writing, but mainly I want it to be for the magazine and press. I’ve done an interview series with some OV writers, and I discuss a lot of publishing issues relevant to the independent presses, like defining our role in the industry and calling out the corporate houses for marginalizing certain types of work, as you mentioned. I wanted to be able to list OV events, as well as my own readings, in a central location, and to talk about what we’re looking for at OV, what our projects are and what we’re publishing next. All of that’s been very fulfilling so far. But if I look at it too much as a place for constant, ongoing dialogue between myself and others in the literary community, then next thing I’d know there would be no Other Voices, and it would just be the blog. So I’m very modest in my goals. I’m definitely not the next Bookslut. But the upside of that is that I’m always looking for other people to get involved with the blog and take a role. It’s really living up to the “other voices” name.
Dan:
Other Voices is a great literary journal. What does an Executive Editor of a literary journal do on a daily basis?
Gina:
The bulk of it, of course, is reading stories for selection, but there are a lot of other, much less fun aspects of the position as well, like grant writing, delivering books consignment to local stores that don’t get us from Ingram or DeBoer, writing checks and addressing envelopes, copy-editing galleys, answering a gazillion emails per day, sending thank you notes to donors, etc. Thankfully we have interns who log our submissions in the database and send them out to readers, or that alone could take up my entire week. But in our peak reading season, I may read 25 or more stories per week. We have a staff of about 35 first readers who screen the submissions and only pass on the ones they’re interested in and want to recommend, but every single story they pass on comes to me. Our Associate Editor, Marina Lewis, and I read all those pass-ons and discuss them. That alone takes up a lot of time. So if it’s February or March, when I’m writing grants for the NEA and Illinois Arts Council, and then say we’re also planning for panels at AWP, it’s easily a full time job. Other times of the year it’s decidedly more part-time, and I can still do my own writing and, you know, speak to my family.
Adding OV Books into the mix was a really big deal from a time perspective. The main thing is that, because our positions are unpaid, we can’t just “hire a publicist” for the books we publish, and sit back and watch a book succeed once we’ve published it. I’m basically doing every stage of operations, from working on creative revisions with the author to copy-editing—though a lot of other staff members copy-edit too and do so better than I do!—to choosing cover art and working on layout and design issues with our printer, to sending out review copies and letters, to organizing the readings nationally, to working with our distributor. Since the same staff runs the press as runs the magazine, this really changed us from being an organization that operates on an academic calendar to one that is in full-swing all year long. And obviously reading book-length manuscripts to choose our titles is so time-consuming that it puts everything else on the backburner for a period.
Right now Cris Mazza is guest-editing an issue for us, which really saved my ass given that I just had a baby and my own novel just came out.
I love reading submissions. I never think to myself while reading stories, Man someone should really pay me for this. I’m extremely happy to do it and feel thrilled every time I find one that resonates and that I simply have to accept. But a lot of times when I’m doing that massive NEA grant, I feel kind of masochistic, especially since funding is so limited these days and the past two years we haven’t even gotten a grant from the NEA.
Dan:
I think to non-readers of literary journals this question and answer may not make much sense, but how do you think Other Voices differentiates itself from other literary journals, even those that concentrate strictly on fiction?
Gina:
Other Voices is very concerned with diversity and actively courts writers outside the mainstream. Wanda Coleman once cited us in The Nation as one of the best venues for fiction writers of color, and that meant a great deal to us. We actively look for stories about non-white characters, working class characters, disabled characters, gay characters, characters who live outside the United States or practice religions other than Christianity and Judaism. For some reason, we’re even very popular on the prison circuit and get a lot of submissions from inmates—we haven’t published one of those yet, but we’ve come very close and would like to in the future. We feel this is all crucial to our mission and to the magazine’s title, even. There are other lit mags that do all these things to . . . but I’d venture to say that most of them don’t. Many literary journals fill their pages primarily through solicitations, which tends to result in their having a somewhat homogeneous feel, even if they’re publishing very high-quality work. Other Voices does not solicit work—we’ve solicited maybe 4 stories in the 11 years I’ve been on board. We have no “slush pile” (and I very much object to the term, actually) and read every single story that comes across the transom exactly the same way. Therefore, new writers, fringe writers, edgier writers, writers of color, writers from abroad—they all have much better chances at OV than at magazines that are soliciting more than 50% of what they publish. Because we’re also very open to experimental work, and work that has some explicit sex or violence in it (so long as it’s crucial to the story and not just gratuitous shock value crap), non-traditional writers are also welcome at OV. Basically, if it is literary we’ll consider it. By “literary” I mean a story that yields just as much on the second and third and tenth reads, if not more—no stories that rely on formulas, easy messages or “punch lines” and therefore become empty once they’ve been read once through.
Dan:
Are there other literary journals out there that you try to make sure you read every issue of?
Gina:
I read StoryQuarterly, in part because it’s a very good magazine, and in part because I think it’s most similar to Other Voices. We’re both in the Chicago area and Marie Hayes and I have similar aesthetics and are friendly with a lot of the same writers. There are differences in the magazines—I would say that SQ has a great international flavor but that they may be a bit less edgy than OV, and they don’t have the focus on reviews and interviews that we’ve started to have—but ultimately there really is a bit of overlap in terms of who and what we do, and as a result we’re very friendly with them and do many joint events, share tables at fairs, etc. Also, we do a lot with them because Marie is just such a delightful person and really a role model in the journal community. Other magazines I like, that I haven’t been published in and can therefore talk up without it being nepotistic, are Mid-American Review, Agni, Water~Stone . . . there are a lot of good ones. I like to check out magazines like Tin House, Ninth Letter and Swink not only because they’re really fun to read, but also because I like to see what magazines with more money than OV has are doing—what those options are like!
Dan:
Were there any specific publishers you used as a model for launching Other Voices’ book imprint, OV Books?
Gina:
Yes—though to no small extent, I was much more concerned with what other independent presses were failing to do from a marketing perspective, and how OV Books could manage to do those things, than I was in emulating anyone’s model for success specifically. There are many, many independent presses out there that have wonderful aesthetics, whose books I love. But there are far fewer who seem to be truly business-savvy, who are able to get their books reviewed by mainstream review venues and sell enough copies to really make any money, and if you want your press to survive you have to really think about those things. Friends of mine who’d had independently-published titles often griped to me that they basically “threw a book and nobody came.” Some of these novels and collections were reviewed once or twice, in lit mags, and never again, and the authors never received a check because so few copies sold. I was determined that OV Books was not just going to publish good fiction, but we were going to get our books out there into stores and into reviewers hands. Most of the indies that are doing those things well are in New York—not all, but quite a few. Soho, obviously, but they’re so much larger than OV Books that it’s like comparing apples and oranges. Richard Nash at Soft Skull, who’s an incredibly generous and gracious man, gave me some valuable advice even though we’ve never met in person. Joanna Yas at Open City—which is probably most similar to OV Books because they’re joined with a journal and publish only one title yearly—met with me in New York in 2004 and we drank wine and I took notes on every single thing she said about how Open City thrives; I guess they were the closest to a model, yes. Joanna is a marketing goddess. Johnny Temple at Akashic is, of course, a real innovator in terms of how he markets his books, borrowing a lot of the successes of independent labels in the music community, but I don’t know Johnny, so I’ve only heard about their successes second hand.
What we did specifically was choose to publish only one title per year so we could live and breathe that book. We sent out about 100 publicity copies. We paid for a modest book tour for Tod Goldberg, our first author. We gave him an advance—a very modest one, but in the hopes that this would give him some money to spend on doing even more readings than we could fund. We also got ourselves a distributor who could really focus on our title. Many indie presses use SPD, and SPD is a heroic organization without which independent presses would be screwed. But they also represent something like 3,000 titles. When they send their catalogue to a bookstore, they can’t pitch your book individually and really hype it up—they don’t have the staff or time to do that for thousands of books. So OV Books went with University of Illinois Press. They took a higher cut of our profits, but they got Tod’s book into stores like nobody’s business. We went into a second printing before the first printing was even officially released. For a start-up indie, that’s very unusual. Some of that was our efforts, but much was also because of UIP and because of the cult of personality that is Tod Goldberg—this guy is a dream come true to have as a first writer. He rocks.
Dan:
What are your goals for both Other Voices and OV Books?
Gina:
The goal for a long time was survival. Then it became growth. That’s where we’re at now: trying to grow ourselves enough that we’re self-sustaining and don’t need to rely at all on grants and donations. We’ll still want these things, of course, and still try to get them, but we would like to be able to feel secure financially in our own endeavors, so that we fund our own projects, period. We’re determined to do this in a way that the corporate publishing industry says will not work: by publishing short story collections and anthologies. Our mission, for both the magazine and the press, is the preservation and discovery of the short story. This form is being marginalized by the big houses, and the independent magazines and presses have become the gatekeepers of the best short fiction now coming out in this country. OV aims to be at the frontlines of that mission. Our second title, The Wrong Place in the World by Corrina Wycoff, is a collection, and our third title will be a cross-cultural anthology.
I should also add that the goal of any Executive Editor of a nonprofit journal or press should be in part that the business can survive without them. I have no immediate plans to leave Other Voices, but I’ve been there 11 years, and whether I leave in 5 years or 20 years, the goal is that the organization can survive a transition of leadership and is not synonymous with its top editor. Lois Hauselman was at the helm of Other Voices for 20 years, and we still miss having her around the office on a daily basis, but we’re proud of having not only survived the transition but turning it into a period of growth by launching the press, bringing on a lot of new, energized people, and re-evaluating where to go next. We just lost our longtime Assistant Editor, and brought on a new Associate Editor and Managing Editor. When you don’t get paid for your work, and have other side jobs and family and your own writing, you always have to be aware of where the closest exit is should you need it, and how the mission of the magazine and press can go on without you and continue to thrive. So my goal right now, in part, is to make sure that other members of the staff can do all the things that I can do, and that new people can be adequately trained to do these things, and that Other Voices never becomes too dependent on me or any other one editor in order to serve writers and readers as we’ve done for 22 years.
Dan:
You guest-edited an anthology, Falling Backwards: Stories of Fathers and Daughters, for Hourglass Books. How was the process different for editing that as compared to editing an issue of Other Voices?
Gina:
Oh, it was really, really different. The fun part was that, for the first time, I solicited a lot of work. I sent tons of letters and emails to writers I liked and asked them to submit, and in some cases asked for specific stories I already knew I liked and wanted to include, because Hourglass was not opposed to including work that had already been published elsewhere. So I felt like I had a great opportunity to put together the absolutely strongest book, creatively, that I possibly could on the subject, and it was a thrill to see so many writers I knew or admired all between one cover. That was a kick.
Ultimately, though, the experience was a frustrating one. I’m used to being in charge of the money, and in the case of Hourglass, money became a big point of contention. There were a lot of miscommunications—I don’t mean in regard to paying me, but in terms of paying the writers. I was supposed to be the spokesperson for the anthology, but sometimes what I’d been given permission to promise by the publisher then never came through, and I was the one who looked bad. We also differed in terms of how to market the book. We had differences of opinion about the cover art, about the issue of print on demand, about how to organize readings, about review copies. We had differences of opinion about just about every stage of production. I was used to being in charge, and that may have been part of it. Another part may have been that the publisher of Hourglass was simultaneously running for Congress while trying to launch a book press! So it was a fun experience in some ways, but it definitely convinced me that OV was the place I wanted to direct my press-launching energies!
Dan:
With everything else that is going on, have you been able to begin your next novel yet?
Gina:
My new agent just sent out my new novel, A Beautiful Violence, to a handful of editors—its first round of submissions. It’s a very different novel than My Sister’s Continent—a coming of age story about an Italian-American neighborhood in Chicago in the early 1980’s. Much earthier—though there’s still a lot of gender politics and some violence. My former agent used to call it “The Sopranos meets My So Called Life,” which I think is pretty apt. But as I was saying, it took a number of years for MSC to actually make it into print, and my then-agent had me at work writing the new novel during much of that time . . . so when I did have to find new representation after his agency dissolved, I sent samples of the new novel instead of MSC. I’ve been working on finishing A Beautiful Violence with my new agent since about last April, and it feels very good to have it out the door. But of course now every time the phone rings I feel like I’m going to puke thinking it might be my agent saying something about a rejection or acceptance. Right now she’s on holiday in Turkey, so for the first time I can answer my telephone and check my email without my heart sinking in fear. She’s coming back this week though, so I have butterflies already!
Dan:
And lastly, if you were a character in "Fahrenheit 451," what work(s) would you memorize for posterity?
Gina:
I’ve lately been asking writers in the OV interview series on my blog what their favorite novels are, and these are mine: The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Immortality, both by Kundera, tie for one slot. The White Hotel by D.M. Thomas, which is about a fictional Freud case study and the Holocaust. The God of Small Things, which seems to me sort of the Indian equivalent of Beloved and has the most beautiful language of maybe any book ever written. Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel, which was something of an inspiration for MSC. And I think Beloved should actually be read in tandem with Absalom, Absalom!, and that the two books together comprise the “Great American Novel,” with a kind of cross-generational, cross-racial dialogue, so those two together are my #5.
If I had one author to memorize, I would try to memorize Kundera’s entire body of work, at least before he started writing in French. His “The Hitchhiker Game” is my favorite short story ever. Either that or I’d chuck all the serious books and memorize my favorite “guilty pleasure” novel, which is Rules of the Wild by Francesca Marciano. I adore that book, with its incredibly self-obsessed narrator and her doomed love affairs all the shallow ex-pat glamour. I love the Nicole character too, the artist who lives alone in Africa and wears her imported Chanel lipstick and snorts her coke and paints junkie heiress girls. On days when my life feels heavy or mired down, I want to run off and be Nicole for a week. That book’s a perfect beach read.
Dan:
Thanks again Gina, My Sister's Continent was a great read and I love each issue of Other Voices I've been able to track down!
Gina:
Thank you, Dan. On both counts, that’s certainly great to hear!
In Mrs. Charbuque I had a character who read the future in human shit as Mrs. C.'s dad does in snowflakes. I thought what lovely bookends
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