An Interview with Sarah Gorham

 

When I first started taking my writing seriously, one of the biggest problems I faced was finding new writers and works, new examples of essay collections to seek out and study. True, there are countless options in literary journals, countless Best American collections and anthologies, but I've always been more interested in reading long-form essays and collections. There's something wonderful about spending more than 10-15 pages with a writer, seeing the new expression that forms in the collage of subjects covered, their juxtapositions, the white narrative spaces between them.

It became much easier to find these collections once I found publishers that were as passionate about the form as I was. One of those publishers was Sarabande Books. Lia Purpura's On Looking was particularly powerful in shaping my tastes in lyric essays, and many of their other titles (including their fiction and poetry offerings) have continued to help me see what great literature is capable of doing.

I had the privilege of having an email conversation with Sarabande's President & Editor-in-Chief, Sarah Gorham. I asked her for her thoughts on the essay collection, as well as Sarabande's philosophy on what they look for when publishing some of the best literary nonfiction today:

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Most of the essay collections being published today seem to be compilations of shorter nonfiction works by writers already established in other genres. I'm thinking of collections like Jonathan Franzen's Farther Away or DFW's recently released Both Flesh and Not: Not that these collections aren't engaging, but it seems like the purpose of such collections (ones that include book reviews, craft talks, etc) is not to celebrate the nonfiction work, but to better inform the audience of the author's fiction. Counter to that, I see a majority of Sarabande's recent essay collections--Let me Clear my Throat, Syzygy, Beauty, and Dear Sound of Footstep, If you Knew then What I Know Now--tend to be first books. Is seeking out first books of particular interest to you as a publisher? Is it just a happy coincidence?

I think the first thing to point out is that all the Sarabande titles you mentioned are book-length essays. The pieces form a unified whole as well as working individually. We do receive miscellanies-reprinted reviews, craft talks, dissertations, and the like-but almost uniformly turn them down. We're not specifically looking for first books, but debuting authors is part of our mission. Hopefully these authors will remain with Sarabande and we can go on to publish their subsequent efforts. We do treat them well!

I'm curious as to your thoughts about the essay collection. Do you believe it's important for a collection to have some kind of thematic connection, some overlapping narrative? Is it all right for a collection to be more of a "greatest hits" for a writer, not necessarily connected, but with a variety of high quality work?

The above response mostly answers this question too. Deny it though we will, there's a human need for story, a progression of dark to light, abstract to personal, however the arc plays out. We look for thematic cohesion in all genres, essay, poetry, and short fiction. Of course if all the essays were really blowaway-on the DFW level (dream on)-we would of course reconsider. That's pretty rare.

I am curious what you, as an editor, are looking for in a submitted manuscript. Particularly when it comes to collections of essays. What separates an okay-manuscript from a great one?

A great manuscript will have uncommon subject matter or an unusual approach to common subject matter. Elena Passarello's Let Me Clear My Throat is a good example of this, her take on the popular voice in all its carnations. Language too will elevate a book. Ryan Van Meter's If You Knew Then What I Know Now is a gay coming of age story, but written with such elegant, pristine sentences, not to mention humor and insight, it's hard to resist. There's got to be innovation and structural variety too. Primary is obsession. If the book didn't have to be written, why would anyone want to read it?

Scoping out your submission information on your website, I noticed that poetry and fiction manuscripts are only accepted in a limited window of time, whereas nonfiction submissions are accepted year-round. Perhaps I'm reading too much into it, but I'm curious if this is Sarabande making a conscious effort to focus more intently on publishing literary nonfiction?

Yes, we've been expanding our essay line steadily for the last ten years. Still, the actual submission numbers are overall far less than either fiction or poetry, so it's still manageable to view them all year. That may change of course. Some of the programs I've visited have asked for an essay competition like our Morton and McCarthy prizes, but I rather like our more personal approach.

Generally speaking, Sarabande is one of the few publishers actively putting out book-length essays and collections. We see small publishers popping up to publish poetry chapbooks, short story collections, etc, but rarely do we see the same fervor for the essay. As a publisher, I'm somewhat curious as to your thoughts: Do you think there's not as much compelling work being produced? Is there something about the form that's not as immediately accessible to an audience?

To answer your question, the new essays are full of stylistic and structural innovation, work that relies on white space, associative thinking, odd juxtapositions-many of poetry's characteristics. By their very nature most large publishers don't want to take the chance their readers might not "get it," if there's an audience at all. The actual numbers of essay submissions are lower, but I see that as an advantage: less to screen. On the other hand, we've had no trouble finding superb manuscripts.

What can we expect to see from Sarande in 2013?

Two books are already out and receiving excellent reviews: Book of Dog, poetry by Cleopatra Mathis and If a Stranger Approaches You, stories by Laura Kasischke. April we present Patricia Vigderman's second essay collection, Possibility: Essays Against Despair. Speaking of DFW, she's written a beautiful essay on him included here. We're supercharged about Moth; or how I came to be with you again, a novel by Thomas Heise that could easily be called essay or even poetry. Others:

Easy Math, poetry by Lauren Shapiro (Morton Prize)
Belle Laide, poetry by Joanne Dominique Dwyer
Speculative Music, poetry by Jeff Dolven
Hymn for the Black Terrific, by Kiki Petrosino
Catherine, Laughing, poetry by C.K. Williams,
Red Holler: Contemporary Appalachian Literature, ed. John Branscum and Wayne Thomas
Fire Year, stories by Jason K. Friedman (MMC Prize)

Allow me to interject in our discussion

a brief note about an interesting essay that arrived at random in the mail last week (thanks to you, unknown person who sent this; it's pretty great to get a package as cool as this one without notice), M. Kasper's OPEN-BOOK, not nominated for the Essay Prize, like other texts under discussion here in recent days:

It's a lovely package, the book itself, an accordion-fold essay made up of eleven five-line, all caps strophes of essay slash possibly poem or crypto-prose, printed on spreads of digitally manipulated backgrounds that are meant to suggest "MARBLE FACING ON WALLS OF WEALTHY CHURCHES...CALLED 'REVETMENT' / TWO SLABS...SOMETIMES MOUNTED LIKE PAGES IN AN OPEN BOOK". The structural conceit is pretty straightforward but is no less lovely for its transparency:

. The book as physical, manipulable object--and the spread as unit of meaning--creates a great deal of what's interesting about this particular reading experience. Don't get me wrong: the prose is right on too, even though there's not a lot of it. What prose there is reads aphoristically, and spreads can mostly be read fruitfully individually, though they're clearly meant to add up to a larger whole. One spread reads: "NOW INSTEAD WE ADMIRE ITS DIALECTIC OF GRAPHIC DAZZLE AND COOL / SERENITY (ON A HOT MEDITERRANEAN DAY ESPECIALLY, ITS META- / MORPHIC MAKE-UP, ITS DISCOVERY, ITS MINIMALISM ("A PRODUCT OF / CHANCE WITH A SMALL DEGREE OF DESIGN" (ALEXANDER COZENS), ITS / LONG, VARIED, MODEST LIFE AS AN EPITOME OF ABSTRACT EXPRESSION," buttressing its ideas with some nice linguistic licks. I'm actually not sure if these lines are prose or poetry or something else (I suppose the hyphenation suggests the prose, but you never know, meta- being one of those words that, isolated, seems to suggest its own reading), but I can say that it is a lovely little reading experience, this one essay, floating up history and philosophy and some serious thinking, all in pursuit of its subject, which is partly the act of reading, that same dirty act that I'm (and now you're, I becoming accomplice) involved in here. One section explains that "OPEN-BOOK REVETMENT DEVELOPED IN THE SAME EPOCH AS THE CODEX / DO THEY BOTH INVITE VIEWERS TO READ? TO READ IN? LATE CLASSICAL / COMMENTATORS ADMIRED HOW RANDOM FORMATIONS IN THE STONE / SUGGESTED REPRESENTATIONAL IMAGES," and it's true that the images behind the text lend themselves to interpretation. Which after all is a space opening up in the reader as we do our thing, right?

I've been thinking a lot lately about the future of the book, if the book has a future (hint: of course it does; see also here if you're interested) and how so much of the hand-wringing about the future of the book is tied up with books that as physical objects don't do a whole lot right now to justify their physical form, the pulp and ink and glue they're made with. They might as well be e-books, I think, or apps, or whatever cloud-based awesome is coming next, because they're hardly books at all. They're text that could be reflowed fruitfully in most any container. So why complain about the end of those books, I wonder? This book, however, is one that couldn't be presented in any other way, really, since the physical act of accordioning the book open is so inherently pleasurable and involved with the meaning of reading, and the text so well tailored to the layout and design and production of the object.

This also strikes me as a hallmark of a successful essay, that its form is the one best suited to its content, and in fact that they're inseparable, like me and pigs-in-blankets, the fs in bff. Which is all as it should be. Stay sweet, M. Kasper. Remember the old technology of the year book, Ugly Duckling Presse? Have a good summer! See you in the fall!

On Maggie Nelson and the Book-Length Essay

So I am reading Maggie Nelson's Bluets (Wave Books, 2009), which has been mentioned at least three times in conversations over the last two weeks, which usually means that I go ahead and order it, amazon-prime-style, which is like cobra style, only more expensive and probably detrimental to independent bookstores. Still: I like convenience. I like progress. I very much like speed. Indeed I seem to have ordered this book twice so I am lending the second copy to one of my thesis students who might find it (particularly its structure) useful as she thinks about ordering and structuring her own book (which is a very different project).

If you haven't read it, it's a shortish (though dense and beautiful) book-length essay loosely circling around lavish and varied descriptions of various blues, or instances of the color blue, or things that reference the color blue, as well as (you guessed it), the author's emotional and physical states and the ways in which she interacts with the world. That's reductive like any lame description of a piece of art that resists being encapsulated in description, but that's a capsule of it. Structured as 240 numbered sections/strophes/paragraphs, it moves via meander, returning periodically to these ideas. This prose is obviously written by a poet, which I like. (Actually I have been recently thinking that everyone should be trained in poetry before they are allowed to write anything else at all.) I won't speak to the whole yet, because I'm trying to move slowly, but the headspace that it creates is quite lovely.

The structure--240 separate short sections, and importantly, numbered consecutively--keeps it tethered down even as individual sections start to unhinge. It's important that the sections tend to circle back to the same ideas, enlarging and expanding on them as they go. It's essentially a meditation, which keeps the brain front and center, rendering it as essay. And there's world here, not just self (though self is explored too: the book is plenty revealing and naked-seeming when it has to about the nature of desire):

68. After building his bower, the satin bowerbird makes a stage nearby out of shiny yellow grass, upon which he will sing and dance for passing females. Experienced builders and performers can attract up to thirty-three females to fuck per season if they put on a good enough show, have built up enough good blue in their bower, and have the contrast with the yellow straw down right. Less experienced builders sometimes don't attract any females at all. Each female mates only once. She incubates the eggs alone. 

69. When I see photos of these blue bowers, I feel so much desire that I wonder if I might have been born into the wrong species.

I could pretty much quote any two consecutive sections from the book, but this gives you a sense of what's happening easily enough.

The headspace is the important part: the mood varies from section to section, but within the same voice. There is a sort of narrative (a lover lost) as the book essays forth.

While not fancy, structure and voice are what makes this book hold together for this reader so far.

In a meaningful coincidence, my place in the book is marked by this:

And yes, I do own the CD single for this. I have been listening to it lately for an essay I'm working on.

The Book-Length Essay

Ever since I finished D'Agata's About a Mountain, and I've been thinking about the book-length essay. Mainly, I've been wondering if such a thing exists.

About a Mountain reads like a series of well-linked essays (keeping the momentum of shorter work while tackling multiple, broad themes that seem wider in scope than what can be done in 20 pages), but I don't know if I can consider it an essay in and of itself. Another example of this is found in Eula Biss's The Balloonists, which reads like a 120 page braided, personal essay. With that said, there are bigger organization principles that amount to chapters, so would we call this a memoir, rather than personal essay? Is there a difference? Does it even matter?

I'm not making any real conclusions here, but I would like to try and generate some discussion here: How do we (or don't we) define the book-length essay? Other good examples out there?