Today I signed and mailed away the publishing agreement for my second novel. Once again, I’m working with Linda Leith Publishing in Montreal and the novel is a blackly comic literary treatment of family life. Our projected release date is Fall 2015. And I still can’t believe this is really my life.
Watch this space for more and more and more details to come.
I’m churchy, okay. I’m not even sorry.
I wrote a novel about people who quote the Bible at funerals, have a large family, and conspicuously don’t drink coffee. I wrote a book with the words “Joseph Smith” printed in it. In case anyone missed it, my characters are Mormons and so am I.
Like all writers, my goal is for everyone to read my book. Everyone includes my fellow Mormons. The Church is active throughout the world but its densest concentration of members is in the American state of Utah. By the time my book was released, I had only been to Utah once. It was when I was twelve years old and caught in one of my parents’ horrifically hot transcontinental summer road trips.
As a grownup author with a book to promote, I didn’t know how to begin to infiltrate the Utah market. I picked through the Internet until I discovered the Whitney Awards. They were invented to recognize fiction produced by Mormon writers. It was a longshot but a few months later, a panel of judges selected my book as a Whitney finalist – one of the top five in the general fiction category.
And that’s when I tripped down the rabbit-hole.
I’m still a novice when it comes to understanding fiction considered “Mormon.” I haven’t learned all its terminologies and talking points. Please forgive any rookie misconceptions here. As far as I can tell from outside the scene, “Mormon fiction” means several different things. It has to since the Church is large and varied enough to include all kinds of people with all kinds of tastes and reading and writing levels. Contrary to nasty, simple-minded fairy tales, there is no monolithic Mormon person. Insisting there is would be calling on a stereotype and it’s as unfair to apply a stereotype to a religious group as it is to apply it to any other bunch of humans.
Far from being a unified movement, the Mormon book-scene is multi-faceted. Within it there are writers who craft books intended solely for Mormon audiences. They produce mainly historical fiction, kissing-only romance, inside jokes, and heartwarming lessons.
There are also Mormon authors – big commercial names like Brandon Sanderson and Stephanie Meyer – who write mass market speculative and young adult fiction.
When it comes to literary fiction, much of the book-length Mormon-y stuff is written from the negative perspectives of disaffected members – people who don’t like church anymore. Some of these writers – no one famous or influential enough for me to spontaneously remember their names – loudly reject the idea that there can be a “Great Mormon Novel” that combines good literary fiction with Mormon orthodoxy.
I didn’t know this a year ago, but I’ve heard there comes a time in most Utah-Mormon writers’ careers when they must ask themselves if they’re going to work within the Mormon niche or in the mass market. I have never asked myself this question. Until recently, the Mormon book-scene hasn’t been part of my consciousness. I’ve missed out on some good contacts and mentors because of that but I’ve also been spared some self-consciousness and second-guessing – the burden of a complicated, value-laden artistic and intellectual drama.
It was when my novel was named a Whitney finalist that it started to get traction in the Mormon book-scene. At first, it was received with enthusiasm. Kind reviews started to appear. People were happy to read my book. It unwittingly defied critics and filled a literary void in the 2013 Mormon publishing calendar.
What I didn’t understand was that all this goodwill was coming from just one corner of the book-scene. I hadn’t counted on the larger, sometimes more petulant corner that prefers to have its heart warmed, flipped over, warmed again, flipped over, warmed again… From that corner, literary work often seems risky and dangerous and pretentious.
I was about to learn this in an episode I’ll call “Off With Her Head.”
There’s a newspaper in Utah called Deseret News. It’s not run by the Church but it is owned by the Church. A freelance book reviewer assigned by Deseret News – a woman the same age as my mum — really, really hated my novel. I can’t find a way to say this that doesn’t sound like bragging so I’ll just blurt it out. I don’t have much experience with bad reviews. The fact that this reviewer didn’t like the book was strange and disappointing. But that wasn’t what made me sick about it.
The reviewer didn’t actually say much about the book – nothing that can be traced back to the text, anyways. Instead of offering an analysis of the story, she chose to denounce it via the lowest road there is: the one that ploughs through my quality as member of the Church. In this review, my book — and by extension myself — was pronounced “not the perspective of the Church.”
A complete stranger had called out my work in a Church-owned publication as bad Mormonism. I don’t know how other churches work but in my Church, book reviewers aren’t supposed to have the authority to say what or who is or is not doctrinally orthodox.
Now, the last thing a novelist should do upon getting a bad review is challenge the reviewer and her editors about it. Everyone knows that. We are aloof artistes. We ignore and move on. But the reviewer had raised issues outside my book. She’d attacked my integrity and fidelity. It was so far offside I blew the whistle.
I complained first to her immediate editors. They ignored me (though the reviewer showed some shocking hegemony when she wrote back telling me it is indeed her role to warn innocent readers when books “don’t match up” to good Mormon doctrine). Fuming, I wrote to the president of the newspaper. Within half an hour of sending that email, Deseret News apologized, took the offensive comments out of the review, and asked me to forward the email where the reviewer voiced her absurd self-appointed mandate to judge my orthodoxy.
My novel had become controversial and polarizing. When the controversy wasn’t terrible publicity, it was great publicity. In the days after the review, people defended my work. This included an old family friend who is actually an ecclesiastical leader in the Church. He likes the book, doesn’t find it doctrinally subversive, and when he read the review he wondered, “What book did she read?”
After all this, I decided to travel to Utah to attend the Whitney Award ceremony anyway. I’d been tumbling down the rabbit-hole of the Mormon book-scene long enough to start to examine my surroundings and the other objects falling with me. I was curious – perhaps morbidly so – and wanted to land in that world and move through it in the physical universe for a little while.
Once again, my parents were my traveling companions in Utah. We had the good fortune to be in Salt Lake City’s Temple Square during a quick, free concert played on the massive pipe organ inside the big church that puts the “Tabernacle” in the “Mormon Tabernacle Choir.” We all agreed this was the highlight of the trip. Instead of indulging himself with a fussy highbrow organ piece, the organist played accessible songs – organ pop-songs with swelling choruses and big finishes like sonic tsunamis. They were loud and fancy – songs meant to show us what the old pipe organ could do, sounds that vibrated through our chest cavities as if we were part of the instrument ourselves. The organist was playing to the hearts and souls of musical Philistines like my parents and me – and we loved it. It was exactly what we wanted. There are times and places to play to more subtle and discriminating tastes but this was not one of them.
Back at the Whitney Awards, things weren’t going so well. I’d brought books to sell and in an entire day, I’d sold one. Sure, it was to the fiction editor of Sunstone magazine but – come on. At the banquet I accidentally flung my tough cut of sirloin into the front of my dress and, of course, I did not win a Whitney Award. I’d been nominated alongside three romances and a buddy-road-trip novel. The best and most literary of the three romances won. For the overall best book award, another romance – self-described as Bronte inspired — was the winner. I was a little offended when, in her acceptance speech, the winner made comments that could have been construed as her claiming to have won because she had prayed harder over her book than the rest of us (again with the beside-the-point piety rankings) but other than that, the award made sense.
See, the final round of the Whitney competition is a popular vote. It’s like a free, quick concert on an ostentatious pipe organ. It’s got to be a crowd-pleaser, an easy, emotionally satisfying romp. That’s just what it is.
What I do appreciate is that someone in the previous selection round, one or more of the Whitney judges, had stuck their necks out and brought my novel – a literary piece, a critic-pleaser by an obscure foreigner – to the Mormon book-scene’s attention. The Whitneys aren’t really the time or the place to celebrate a novel like that – not yet, anyways. But someday they might be. This year, maybe they came a little closer. Maybe someday that mythical “Great Mormon Novel” will appear on the scene and by then even the most guarded reviewers in the Deseret News will have learned not to be angry and afraid of it.
Until then, take my novel, Mormon book-scene. Take it into your Wonderland and let it wear away some of the harshness of the hegemony still lurking there. Grind it up, add its few small grains to the foundation being built for something better than what’s there now.
In preparation for an upcoming multi-author book event, I’ve been reading novels outside my usual range of Can-lit and literary fiction. The atypical reading choices I’ve been making have been eye-opening – literally. So far, what’s struck me most in my venture into crowd-pleasing commercial fiction is the diligent reporting of characters’ eye-colours.
Maybe everything I know is wrong but for me, all on its own, the colour of a person’s eyes determines nothing about how they experience life. Okay, I admit my blue-eyed family may do more than the average amount of squinting in bright light. And if I ever produce a brown-eyed child while married to my fellow blue-eyed husband, it would add some horrible drama to our home-life. But most of the time, iris pigment is not the crucial narrative factor a random sample of Western pop-fiction might lead us to believe it must be.
Mentioning eye colour in literature can be a nice touch — like writing at length about a sunset or the ocean or whatever. (Writers can get away with a lot in the name of world-building.) And in the right context, eye colours can be important story elements. In Irving Berlin’s Easter Parade, Judy Garland closes her eyes and tests Fred Astaire’s devotion by challenging him to remember her eye colour. Even as a kid watching the old movie on TV with my mum, I knew this was an important moment. It advances the plot, reveals something about each of the characters, and it’s hecka sweet. Well done, 1940s film-makers. Look at you, making eye color genuinely relevant and letting it arise organically from the narrative. That’s how it’s done.
The same could be said for any detailed description of characters’ looks. Descriptions can work to propel the story, motivate actions, explain character traits. But sometimes they’re dumped into a story apropos of nothing. It’s as if we’re driving along an icy street and someone yanks up the parking brake and we’re flying in a circle for a moment, calling out eye and hair colours, spinning out of the true direction we’d been traveling. Or it’s like the story has deteriorated into a junior high school Language Arts lesson and we’re now outside the narrative reading a “character sketch.” At their best, character sketches are just exercises meant for the writer’s purposes. They’re notebook scribbles, not even first drafts, and certainly not good reading.
I hope all of that sounds technical and reasonable. Here’s a personal reason why I write without bothering to explain the minutiae what everyone looks like: I don’t care. I honestly do not care what people look like. That’s not to say I’m any less shallow than anyone else – I care far too much about how people smell – but it is to say that when I’m choosing what to pay attention to, a person’s looks aren’t all that compelling.
When I’m acting as creator of a book-world, I let everyone look the way readers want to imagine them. That’s done by forgoing physical descriptions I don’t need for plot and thematic reasons. Giving up the creative control that comes with dictating everyone’s colour palette is worth the sacrifice if that’s what it takes to keep physical traits from interfering with everything else I’m trying to say.
Describing a human being’s looks – even a fictitious human being’s – is actually not like describing a sunset. It might feel idle and innocuous but it’s not. Sunsets don’t come with politics. People do. Spelling out physical descriptions can introduce prejudices and tropes that distance readers. If that’s what an author wants (and sometimes it is), carry on, I guess. Descriptions also run the risk of fueling male gazes and other sources of negative stereotypes. They can end up assuring readers certain appearance-based prejudices are right and fair. I have a revulsion to abetting that.
In the novel Eleanor Rigby, Douglas Coupland deliberately withholds the information that the narrator, a woman, is overweight. He allows the reader to discover her through what she does and says and only later introduces what she looks like. The delayed fat-reveal is brilliant. I was surprised at how it affected me. I am not a fat-shamer. I’m not fat myself (she rushed to say) but during my most intensive baby-raising years I was a bit of a chubby-chick. It runs in my family. I love fat people. I understand on a deeply personal level that they are not lazy or greedy or bad. And it meant I was shocked at how my vision of Coupland’s character unwittingly changed for the worse after I read she was fat.
To add another layer of complexity, Coupland’s narrator challenges the reader, saying we must have been able to tell she was fat before the reveal, as if something so fundamental must have been visible all along. Of course, it wasn’t. Her looks don’t make her any less human or relatable as a character. But it’s only through withholding a physical description and showing us our own reactions to it that Coupland demonstrates the depths of our appearance-based prejudices and how easy it is for writers to be complicit in maintaining them.
By the way, Judy Garland’s eyes – they were brown.
If Can-Lit is subdued by government grants it’s got nothing to do with me.
Between spurts of productive work on my latest just-keep-swimming short writing project, I indulged my bad habit of listlessly scrolling through my Twitter feed. The Canadian literary community – for all you normal folks out there – is ravenous for controversy. We love and hate to have a focal point for cheeky, gleefully indignant tweets and blogs. This winter, controversy flared up around comments 2012 Giller Prize judge Gary Shteyngart made while drinking with a reporter in New York City. He said something about Can-Lit lacking risk-takers. His now notorious explanation was that Canadian writers “all get grants” and therefore “they want to please the Ontario Arts Council, or whatever it is.”
Now, anyone who follows this blog knows I came to be a working writer through unconventional channels. I don’t have an MFA from any of the creative writing programmes where Canada’s up-and-coming literary talent is usually hot-housed. I live in a rural area where the local literary fiction circle includes me and my lovely neighbour. I have never worked in publishing. And, I have never received any grant money. No arts council – certainly not the faraway Ontario Arts Council – has ever funded my work.
In the spirit of Can-Lit-Da’s relentless self-reflection, I considered what Shteyngart’s comments (which he later joked should be taken in the context of his “drunken stupor”) say about me.
For one thing, there isn’t much room in his comments for me. I disprove his over-generalization. I wrote a manuscript and sold it to a traditional literary publishing house without applying for, let alone getting, a government grant. Maybe I can ignore everything Shteyngart said and join the cheerleaders tweeting titles of great, “risky” Canadian books which may not have been (but probably were) written by grant recipients.
Or, I could feel robbed. How fair is it that I work in a country that seems to have an international reputation for being glutted with arts grants of which I’ve never been paid my share?
Or, I could embrace Shteyngart’s assumption that writing needs to be somewhat staid in order to get the bureaucratic rubber-stamping of a government grant. I could try to spin my grant-free-working-writer status as a sign that my stuff must be subversive and edgy — the kind of thing lucidly drunk, chatty New York City hipsters might find interesting.
There might be a bit of support for the third option – the fun, cocky, unlikely option. We haven’t had a bad review of my novel but we’ve seen it described over and over again with words like “odd, strange, surprising” or “unusual.” I knew when I was writing the book that it was peculiar and I had to keep writing it that way regardless. And now — if Shteyngart is right — I have the distinction of writing it without a grant and thereby proving what a weirdo I am. I should revel in that, I guess. There’s not necessarily anything wrong with it. There could be a whole lot right with it.
Yeah, all this reasoning is a bit of a stretch.
I don’t know if what I do is at all risky. Frankly, it’s 2014 and I’m not even sure I’d recognize a new literary risk if I saw one. And I can’t deduce a risk by whether there’s anything entered on the grants line of an income tax form. Like most people, I just write what I want to write, whether anyone wants to pay for it or not.
I assumed the new Facebook message was going to be another invitation to an in-house-selling-stuff-party from one of my girlfriends (events for which I have a lot more sympathy ever since I started hawking books out of the back of my car).
It was actually a message from — you guessed it — my high school boyfriend’s dad, a man I have not seen in over twenty years. Even so, he had sought out and read my novel. And he liked it — said he wished the book was longer. He’s not a professional literary critic but he is someone I admired so much as a teenager I always made myself into an idiot in front of him. His review of my book — short, private, informal, encouraging – meant as much to me as a printed page in a prestigious publication.
That’s real-me talking. Pro-writer-me can’t be so sentimental. Amassing reviews in established, well-known publications is serious business. It’s no place for getting mushy and indulging in adolescent vindication. For some of us, book reviews — those columns bundled in newspapers and obscure literary journals, those afternoon public radio programs I listen to while folding laundry — are not idle entertainment.
I treasure all the professional reviews I’ve got. It’s a huge honor to see half a page of a national newspaper devoted to discussing a story I made up. In return, I’ve started writing long-form book reviews myself. The first will appear this winter in a new Canadian literary journal called The Rusty Toque. Writing a review is time consuming and intellectually demanding. But I owe it to my community to do it anyway.
Book reviews are also controversial. Some of the nastiest squabbling in the writing world today revolves around the state and fate of book reviews and literary criticism. Authors of commercial fiction complain about reviewers being snobs fixated on “serious” literary work and ignoring popular books. Reviewers who write for established, bookish publications have been known to sneer at other reviewers who start book-blogs and write about whatever they want. Even more casual than book bloggers are blurb-length reviewers on websites like Amazon and Goodreads. Some authors denounce these hobbyist reviewers who sometimes off-handedly and ignorantly judge their work — and their private lives. At the same time, the hobbyists complain about website policies they feel are muzzling them. In the world of book reviews, everyone’s threatened, no one’s completely happy.
Reviews for self-published books are an even murkier morass. Most publications still won’t review self-published books. Among whatever high quality work might be out there in self-publishing, there are literally millions of sub-standard products glutting the system. Being shut out of the traditional review pool leaves self-publishers to create their own systems for evaluating each other’s work – systems vulnerable to abuse where real reviews can be hard to distinguish from ones that have been bought or swapped for reciprocal but meaninglessly gushy reviews.
All of this might be very important but I’m still newbie enough to just be thrilled anyone is reading and talking about my work. I’m grateful for any airtime or column space or bandwidth I can get.
And that includes coverage by book bloggers. I’m not moved by arguments from those who worry bloggers are cheapening and proletarianizing literary criticism. I think there’s definitely room for plain-spoken, personal reflections on books and reading. In my experience, there’s some very good writing in book blogs, like Daniel at The Indiscriminate Critic who described the narrative style in my book as “a mental Mobius strip.” This is exactly what I hoped to achieve even though I didn’t see it that way until he said it. Authors who’ll agree to interviews are being asked thoughtful questions on book blogs too. Laura at Reading in Bed came up with a list of questions that excavated the roots of the themes I write about just as well as any professional has done to date.
Book bloggers can read earnestly and critically. They take their work seriously. And they can write from a personal angle that more formal reviews can’t approach. They’re doing for literary criticism what book clubs are doing for publishing – keeping it relevant and accessible to people not professionally invested in the industry. That’s a great service to all of us.
What’s this book about and where does it fit?
Ever since I got my book deal last autumn, I’ve been fumbling with the inevitable, perfectly natural question of, “So what’s your book about?” Maybe I’m over-thinking it but I find this question difficult.
The first thing that makes my book hard to explain is the fact that it doesn’t fall neatly into a genre — and I’m not just saying that to try to sound cool and transcendent and stuff. If the book was about sorceresses with magic necklaces and metal undies I could say it was fantasy. If it was peopled with smoochy vampires it would be paranormal romance. If it was about stabby psychopaths I could call it a crime novel. If it prattled on about dating and shopping it would be chick-lit. But it’s none of those things. It’s kind of lovey-dovey, a bit creepy in parts. It’s a little otherworldly yet it’s realistic and earthy.
When I was still submitting the manuscript, still ticking boxes in search engines of databases listing publishers’ interests, the box that fit best was called “literary fiction.” And it’s the classification now stamped on the back cover of the book. However, it’s also a term that gets sneered at for its elitist implications. Who’s to say what’s of literary merit, and on and on and on… Still, if for no other reason than its acknowledgement that a flashy, racing story-line can come second to arty, thematic prose, literary fiction is the category that suits the novel best (she said, cringing, hoping not to sound elitist).
Another category fits simply because of my geography. It’s “Can-Lit” — Canadian literature. I am Canadian so, in some ways, I can’t help but write Canadian literature. I’ve fallen back on this description a few times. But Can-Lit has gained a character of its own over the years and when I offer it as an answer, I need to be prepared to embrace that character. I need to be able to wave my hand and believe myself when I say, “It’s CanLit — you know, bad weather and complicated relationships.”
Nothing I say is very precise or descriptive or satisfying for nice people asking about my book. So here’s a short Q&A with me about my novel. It appears in my publisher’s online literary mag, Salon .ll., and hopefully it will shed some light on what I’m writing and why someone might want to read it. Go ahead and click the link below.
Jennifer Quist, PhD 