I Can No Longer Contain Myself

Today is July 5th, which means I'm am full stuffed on meats, salads of various potatoes and pastas, and America. It is morning. I am in my underwear, the after images of fireworks still dancing in my corneas. And, They Could No Longer Contain Themselves sitting next to me at my desk, waiting to be talked about, to talk to us, to be binged and purged.

Just look at that pretty little book over there, the cover a windswept barren, the quiet hue of blue, the tree stump of possible forest fire or maybe tired and newly-homed beaver, or newly stuffed, as beavers actually eat wood. Did you know that? I never knew if they actually feasted on trees, or just made their homes from it, but Wiki confirms they fill their bellies with it. Just imagine if we humans made our homes of what we fill our bellies with.

This month, I make my home of these words, and I hope you will come party with me.

Here's a quick story about They Could No Longer Contain Themselves, what it is, how it came to be, straight from the fingers of its publishers:

"In 2009, celebrity judge Sherrie Flick chose Sean Lovelace’s How Some People Like Their Eggs as the winner of our Third Annual Short Short Chapbook Contest. Flick said of the book, “Lovelace’s little stories seek out these big-guy concepts and bring them down like in an old movie filled with gangsters, trench coats, cigarettes, and tough-talking women with nice legs—using smart dialogue and wit.” Lovelace’s chapbook spoke to more than just Flick: By spring 2010, the run of 300 specialty letterpressed copies of Eggs was on the verge of selling out.

Around this same time we heard from our Fourth Annual Contest judge Dinty W. Moore that he’d chosen Mary Hamilton’s We Know What We Are as the 2010 winner. We were thrilled, but found ourselves loath to give up the other four finalists—Elizabeth J. Colen’s Dear Mother Monster, Dear Daughter Mistake, John Jodzio’s Do Not Touch Me Not Now Not Ever, Tim Jones-Yelvington’s Evan’s House and the Other Boys Who Live There, and Mary Miller’s Paper and Tassels—to other publishers. All five of the finalists that year stunned us with their precision and heart, their longing and skill. It was the most stylistically diverse group of finalists we’d ever had, and yet all the manuscripts hummed with the same kind of energy and deep humanness. We had to publish them.

And so we decided to bring the four finalists from our Fourth Annual Short Short Contest and the celebrated and sold-out winner of our third together under one cover."

So there you have it. This little anthology of 5 chapbooks, brought to you simply because the ladies at Rose Metal Press simply could not stand to let someone else publish them; they wanted them for themselves, to bring them all to all of our selves.

And last night, while holding this book in my hand, turning it over and over, reading it page and page again, I realized one of the reasons I most like this book, beyond the incredible words inside: exposure.

I'm a victim of name recognition, I'll admit it. When I first came upon the small press community a couple years ago, I knew no one, and it was perhaps one of the most exciting times of my life. I devoured book after book of authors unnamed to me. These new words invaded me and shaped me in ways I've not been shaped in years. They fed me, fed my own words, I grew in them like bones awash in milk.

But now, I've grown to know who I can trust. I harbor to names like Aubrey Hirsch, Matt Bell, Adam Robinson, xTx, and a couple/few dozen others with whom I feel I can trust to bring a thrill to my skin and a warmth to the belly of me with their words. I gravitate to these authors when I see their names in new issues of journals and reviews. This book contains a couple of those names: Sean Lovelace and Mary Miller. Tim Jones-Yelvington as well, though until now I had known and trusted him more as a person than as his words.

So of course, I still gravitate to them, see their work packaged together, and immediately think, "Yes!" click "Add to Cart!" Get this book in my hand, the tactile weight, the smooth gloss of cover, and ruffle of page. I readreadread.

I read first those I know and trust. We stand in something like a circle, sipping and talking and sipping and laughing. Sean is leaning against the counter, beer in hand. Mary smiles warm, her laughter coming out her eyes. Tim owns the room, Tim alight with feather and glitter, everyone notices Tim, wants to touch him, wants to see him shimmer. We talk and we catch up, we tell stories of what we have known since we last met, last shared words.

I become aware of these other couple of people invited to the party, Elizabeth Colen and John Jodzio, standing on the periphery, they sip their gin and tonics, their mint juleps. They wait politely for their turn to speak. And then, without warning they burst on to me, their words move and captivate, and I spend the evening with them, talking about daughters, monsters, mothers, warlocks, glaciers, and panty thieves. Spending the evening with them, reading them I found that same feeling of wonder and discovery I felt a couple years ago. The feeling of finding new voice, of making new friends at a party, that up all night talking and talking feeling.

I hope the same happens to you. Perhaps you snagged this book because like me you recognized Mary Miller, trusted her words to feel true and earnest on the page, and in doing so, at least 1 or 2 of these authors packaged alongside her work in this little number are authors completely new to you. I hope this book opens us all up to someone new, opens us all up to something new.

Let's make some discoveries together. Let's have a party. Let's invite all our friends, and our friends's friends, find people we don't know, fresh faces awash in glow and drink. Let's no longer contain ourselves. Let's talk and talk.

Chapter 18: How To Ride a Bike

It’s fitting that yesterday we talked about fathers and Lidia’s attempt to humanize hers, because today’s chapter deals with a pivotal moment in their relationship. After yesterday’s chapter, in which Lidia unpeels the layers of her father’s story (his career, his time as an artist, his service in the war, and his own absent father), this chapter provides a startling jump back to the version of her father we’ve come to know.

In “How To Ride A Bike” Lidia is ten, her sister has run away from home, and, as a consolation, her father brings home a “hot pink Schwinn with a banana seat and streamers coming out of the handlebars” (pg. 107). But instead of letting Lidia’s excitement translate into determined practice, her father forces her to ride the bike for the first time, pushing her clumsily around the neighborhood streets, getting angrier and less patient as her feet fail to move, as her ten-year-old body fails to balance:

“Goddamn it, I said put your feet on the pedals. . . . I said look up, goddamn it. . . . Don’t cry, for christ’s sake. . . . Would you please pedal? For christ’s sake" (pgs. 108-109).

This is not the idyllic scene of a little girl learning to ride a bike for the first time. This is not the cinematic moment where the music swells and the frame slows while a father lovingly teaches his daughter how to ride a bike, gingerly brushing off her sweater in between benign falls. This scene is aggressive and violent: Lidia is scared and stunned at the hands of her raging father. It’s important to note that while what’s literally happening is that Lidia’s father is teaching her how to ride a bike, what is implied is a figurative rape: he forces her to relinquish control of her body, he forces her to engage in an act that is terrifying and physically painful, and he forces her to keep going even when she asks him to stop.

What happens when her father takes her to the top of a hill and lets her go without any real instruction on how to steer or brake is gruesome, humiliating, and culminates in a violation of Lidia’s girlish body. This, in a way, is Lidia’s loss of innocence.

The perversion of this typically idyllic scene is startling. We feel Lidia’s fear. We feel her physical pain. We also feel, when she steels herself against tears, how immensely this moment must have shaped her life. I can’t help but think of Lidia’s insight on page 76 that “damaged women . . . don’t think [they] deserve kindness” and how this moment must have confirmed that conviction.

I have a hard time explaining this to people who have never experienced it themselves, but I’ll try: when you grow up in an environment in which your comfort, safety, and happiness are not paramount, you grow up to be a person who believes that your comfort, safety, and happiness are not paramount. If your parents do not make you feel loved and safe and respected, you will never know that you can (or should) feel anything other than unloved, unsafe, and disrespected.

For Lidia, the trauma of learning how to ride a bike desensitizes her. All of what was innocent in her (her tears, her vulnerability, her thin skin) is broken. In the wake of her trauma, Lidia is left “Bleeding. Bleeding. But not crying. For years and years, after that” (pg. 111).

One of the wonderful things I learned in therapy was that we, as adults, can be our own protectors. So many of our behaviors are leftover defense mechanisms from childhood: how we were neglected, how we were abandoned, how we were made to feel unimportant. But the good news is that we aren’t ten years old anymore. We can protect ourselves. We can nurture ourselves. We, wonderfully, can be our own parents.

Of course, it’s not all hunky-dory, problem-solved. Even if you’re fully capable of nurturing and being kind to others, nurturing and being kind to yourself can be a constant battle. Here’s one way that works for me: I think of what I would say to my children if they were in a similar situation. What would I say to my daughter if she were in love with a man who had never loved her? What would I say to her if she were on the precipice of change and suddenly terrified? I’ll tell you what I wouldn’t say: I wouldn’t say, “Get over it” or “Stop being such a baby” or “You’re so pathetic” or any number of things I say to myself in moments of self-doubt and uncertainty. What I would say is something more along the lines of “Darling girl, be strong. You will be okay because you are kind, resourceful, resilient, and brave.”

I should clarify: I don’t actually have any children of my own.

So, I probably shouldn’t admit this, but I will: sometimes I go as far as to write them letters. Instead of sitting on my couch and hating myself for not being strong enough, or smart enough, or perfect enough, I write letters to my unborn children telling them what to do if ever they find themselves in a similar situation.

Here is one that I wrote last year:

Recently I lost the most significant person in my life. Thankfully he is not actually lost. He is alive and well, living and existing just fine without me, and I am grateful for that. Grateful that he is not lost forever.

What I have felt since has been awful. It has been a combination of sadness and a sense that “this is all my fault.” Try as I may to dissuade it, it’s there: I am too fat, too quiet, too uninteresting, too indecent, etc. What all of that self-criticism distills down to is the belief that I am unlovable. Even while I put on a determined face and agree with my friends that he is an asshole and a jerk and all the other typical man-hating tropes, even while I feel angry and hurt and rationally right, what I feel underneath all of that is, “He doesn’t love me because I did something wrong, because I am wrong. He doesn’t love me because I don’t deserve to be loved.”

[See above re: damaged women not believing they deserve kindness.]

The dialogue in my head goes like this: “He wants to be with seven other women instead of me because no one would want to be with me.” Never do I question him. Never do I ask myself what kind of person would want to be with seven other women instead of me, the girl he called his “other half,” the girl he called his best friend. Never do I stop focusing so much on what I did wrong and ignoring the more obvious questions: What did he do wrong? What is wrong with him?

This is what I think: when someone who has always loved you—who is supposed to love all of you—suddenly, without explanation, does not, it is not your inability to be loved that is to blame, it is their inability to love.

People are inherently damaged. We come into the world pure: smooth skin, blue eyes, soft fingernails. And we harden. We scar. Our skin thickens, our nails crack. All we can do is try to map our scars. All we can do is try our best to be kind—to others and to ourselves. We are not responsible for anyone else’s inability to be kind or understanding.

You are not responsible for anyone else’s inability to be kind or understanding.

This is what I know: if someone is not capable of loving you the way you deserve to be loved (because, believe me, you deserve to be loved well), they do not deserve to love you.

OK. Your turn. What are the ways in which you take care of yourself when you are at your lowest?

You Are the Fireworks Not the Goodbyes

Here they come. Boom boom, splatters of light. Grills, slushies, flip-flops. June's gone, and that means we have to say goodbye to Today & Tomorrow's month as a featured book on The Lit Pub. Don't worry! T&T's time at The Lit Pub isn't over forever, but before we get into all that, a few huge thanks:

Foremost, thank you to Molly Gaudry and Chris Newgent for inviting Magic Helicopter in the first place. The Lit Pub is proving itself to be everything envisioned for it: an open and welcoming place to discuss new independent books and share our own stories, a smart and friendly place to talk about how we relate to what we read. In short, a real reading community. Kudos to Molly and Chris for all their hard work, and to the many folks working under The Lit Pub umbrella to make this place so awesome. Special extra fist bump to Molly, who is crazy dedicated and ambitious, not to mention ridiculously generous, smart, talented, and all those good things. I honestly can't think of anyone else in the indie lit community who could've coordinated this project as well as she has (certainly not me!), or who could've pursued such impressive goals in such a real way. Molly is the real deal, y'all.

And big duhs of thanks to Ofelia Hunt for writing such a hypnotic and provocative and terrific novel. And what's more, for lending her time to participate in this discussion and answer questions and tell us what the deal with the thin man is. Ofelia is a huge talent, and T&T is only the first battalion. I can't wait to see what comes next from the big plastic aisles of Hunt's mind.

I think a big part of the reason this launch month has worked so well has been the ample participation of the authors: Ofelia, Ethel Rohan, and Lidia Yuknavitch. For them, what a great chance to have so many people curious and passionately discussing your work. And for us, how cool that The Lit Pub gives the authors a chance to engage so directly with readers.

We've talked a lot about a lot of different things with T&T this month: authorial identity, violence, consumerism, families, grandfathers, unreliable narrators, robots, lies, and (of course) Bill Murray. T&T isn't all that easy a book to break down into segments and submit for discussion. What I love about it is how unique a beast it is, a uniqueness that makes it hard to come up with ways to spur the kind of emotional personal discussion that's gone on so well for The Chronology of Water and Cut Through the Bone. But I've been constantly delighted by the insight and energy of the discussions we do have, and I'm especially grateful to guest posters Amber Nelson, Dave K, and Tao Lin for pushing the conversation in new directions when I ran out of things to say. As Chris mentioned in his farewell post, The Lit Pub feels like a throwback to college in the best ways; not lit class so much as the awesome discussions we would have with friends after class. When we went back to our tuna can apartments or weird-ass hippie cafes and got into the real nitty-gritty about the words we loved and cared about.

So thanks, finally, to all you smart and witty and enthusiastic readers for making The Lit Pub what it is. I've been stoked to share Today & Tomorrow with you, and I hope you stick around, as we'll continue to have a page here, and I invite anybody to contact me about making a guest post in the future, hosting a new discussion, etc. If you've been enjoying the discussion but haven't had the chance to read the book yet, don't worry: it will stay available in The Lit Pub's Community Bookstore. I'll also try to keep everybody here abreast of T&T developments: new reviews, interviews, readings, etc. For example, if you haven't seen it yet, check out Ofelia's Largehearted Boy Book Notes, where she talks about the book and some of its musical inspiration, including shoutouts to Judy Garland, Modest Mouse, Cat Power, and more.

We'll be making way in July for a new featured publisher and book, but we'll still be here, eager to hang out with this awesome community of readers. Happy fireworks, everybody. Thanks for a great June!

If you're in San Francisco, Portland, or Seattle, make sure to catch Ofelia at one of her upcoming readings. Like this Thursday, July 7th, at Adobe Books in San Francisco. That's right, the real Ofelia. See if she really looks like Bill Murray. Then let us know.

A Resolution Higher than "Real Life"

I tried writing about why I liked Today & Tomorrow and began to feel, to some degree, like I was writing something that, if I continued working on it until I felt completely satisfied, would eventually be either Today & Tomorrow verbatim or another novel "inspired" by Today & Tomorrow. Instead I made a gif that tries to convey how Today & Tomorrow influences me—increasingly, with each sentence of it that I read or reread—to think and feel about things. The gif would be more accurate if it seemed brighter, cleaner, more interesting, more "modern," more consistent in style/presentation and if it were in a resolution that seemed higher than "real life," I feel.

Here are some parts of Today & Tomorrow I especially liked:

Parking-lots and driveways are theoretically the same thing. Could one transport you to the other? (page 43)

Aaron falls heavily onto the wide sofa. His torso falls at a different speed than his arms, his head, and each part of Aaron's falling at different speeds. The sofa slides a little and hits the wall. Aaron's narrow fatless head flops over the sofa-top and his wide fat body sinks into the sofa until the sofa springs back and holds Aaron's body in place. (52)

"It's like this. Everything that's alive dies and so it's no big deal to kill a thing because it's natural. People don't kill things directly and so think killing's evil. It's not. Every person should kill something—start in elementary school. If I were President, I'd mandate that each kindergartner slaughter a live chicken the first day of school, then every year thereafter, first day of school, students would slaughter a larger animal [...]." (80)

We were sitting in Grandfather's Cadillac. There was sun. I was small and my toes were small and I watched my toes and wiggled my toes and felt the smallness of them. They seemed like tiny independent ants, beetles maybe. With the right pressure, would my toes pop? (187)

If I designed my own people, I'd make all human-angles sharp, knife-like—chins, elbows, knees, noses, fingers, all would end in  points. People would embrace one another carefully, at substantial risk to their health and well-being. (191)

There are one-million Wal-Marts. Which one could he mean? Everywhere could be Wal-Mart. Are Wal-Mart and Aaron the same? I feel nervous and imagine conveyors of cartons moving slowly into Wal-Mart. Forklifts, each driven by Aaron. (192)

"How would you design people?" I ask Merna. "If you designed people?" Merna doesn't answer. We're in the hallway and there are many doors and walls and light-fixtures are thin gray forms that move slowly at the edge of my eyes, but not really the edge because my eyes have no edge. We're standing in front of a closed door and Merna's hand's on the doorknob. "I'd make people sharp," I say. "I'd make people very small, efficient so that each moment was perfect. Everyone in points. People would be ant-sized, always useful in some way. So small it would be difficult to destroy things, or even to change them. People wouldn't be people. They'd be something else." (199)

I watch the boy's face and it still smiles but the smile has become confused, strange. I want to wear this smile. I move my mouth experimentally but there's no mirror and I feel nervous and hideous and self-aware. (203)

"[I] lean against the window which is cold and smooth. But not really smooth, I think. There are miniature imperfections, cracks or carters, fissures, and especially faces and skin and glass, and glass's a liquid and skin, faces are liquids also, everything is liquid, and all liquids move uncontrollably, reshape and reform themselves, and really every molecule or atom or smaller than that even, every electron or gluon, every vibrating string, is alone and random, operating only in its best interest which is unpredictable and everything's the same and people are just a trillion-billion-billion pieces of something else." (223)

I try to remember but I don't know how to remember or even how to try to remember. (227)

Chapter 16: Swimming with Amateurs

It says a lot for an author when, after a week of eighteen-hour days spent reading and analyzing literature, I choose (as in can’t put down) to read her book instead of paint my nails and watch Clueless as planned.

I picked up Lidia’s book last Friday to get a feel for the text and what questions I should be considering in preparation for writing this guest post. My intention was to only read a few chapters, because there is little time for pleasure reading while I’m in school. (That’s where I am now, by the way, sitting in a stiff-backed chair in the thin-walled library with a stack of essays on nineteenth century aesthetics, Virginia Woolf, and psychoanalytic criticism of The Sound and the Fury. [Seriously, if I have to read one more essay about the gravity of female virginity, I’m going to start burning books.])

Not only do I barely have time to read for pleasure (let’s be real: I barely have time to read everything I need to for class), but the last thing I want to do after reading from sunup to well after sundown is read anything I don’t absolutely have to.

Except, last Friday I picked up Lidia’s book, and my evening of watching Amy Heckerling’s retelling of Emma and licking Doritos crumbs from my fingerprints went out the window. [Resist temptation to make textual connection to Septimus Smith in Mrs. Dalloway.] Where I’m going with this is here: this book is good. Like chest-grabbing, can’t-turn-the-pages-fast-enough, someone-get-me-a-book-light-because-I’m-going-to-be-reading-this-all-night good.

The chapter “Swimming with Amateurs” is about an evening Lidia spent “night swimming” with Ken Kesey and three other friends who are all “totally, completely, unapologetically, rocket shot high.” In this chapter, Lidia and Ken speak of their deceased children (his killed at the age of twenty in a car crash, and hers “pink and rose-lipped” and stillborn). As they swim under the occasionally shadowed moon, Lidia uses piecemeal memories of the evening to explain to how meeting Ken “so close to death brought writing into [her] hands.” In this moment of utter grief, a moment in which Lidia admits to being numb from the death of her daughter, writing, like a way out, is put in front of her.

And writing is a way out, isn’t it? Putting experience into words, whether it is through writing or retelling, objectifies it. It puts it outside of us, in front of us, and into concrete terms to be manipulated and examined objectively.  It’s why talking about loss is better than not talking about it. It’s why authors obsessively rewrite the same story until it takes adequate shape outside the confines of their minds. Last year, for a class I took on Trauma and the Literature of Survival I read more trauma theory than any one person should. I read a lot of Freud, yes, but I also read a wonderful book by a woman who met with holocaust survivors and asked them to tell their stories. Unlike many historians who had approached them, this author was trying to capture the feeling of their experience, not the historical truth. Faced with this open-ended ability to talk, these men and women began forming a narrative: they told of losing friends, of losing their homes, of losing fathers, mothers, sisters, and brothers. After decades of dealing with the most immense of traumas, talking about their experiences was the only way they were able to make sense of them. It didn’t lessen the pain (nothing, I imagine, ever does), but it did give it shape. Telling their stories took their repeating memories of trauma and put them into words.

In “Sketch of the Past,” Virginia Woolf (yes, you’re going to have to get used to the Woolf and Faulkner references for the next five weeks) describes how writing, rewriting, and finally capturing her mother successfully in the form of Mrs. Ramsay in To The Lighthouse was helpful in laying the trauma of her mother’s death (she died when Virginia was thirteen) to rest: “I ceased to be obsessed with my mother. I no longer hear her voice; I do not see her. I suppose that I do for myself what psychoanalysts do for their patients. I expressed some very long felt and deeply felt emotion. And in expressing it I explained it and then laid it to rest.” Narrative objectifies traumatic experience and renders it comprehensible. Even though Virginia would sneer at the suggestion, writing is therapeutic.

Of course I don’t mean to be emotionally simplistic and insensitive. I don’t mean to suggest that writing about trauma instantly cures one of its effects. In Virginia Woolf’s biography by Hermione Lee, the author questions whether Virginia “exorcise[d] her mother as completely as she tells herself she has” since she “goes on, after To The Lighthouse, calling her death to mind, and is still trying to describe her—and still finding it difficult—at the end of her life.” Creating narrative does not necessarily “cure” trauma, but it can certainly aid in its integration.

Here’s my admission of bias on this topic: I went night swimming once, not too long ago. I belly-flopped into the black water of Lake Champlain with my nose plugged between my thumb and forefinger, while the man I had loved for ten years dove over me and into the water, his perfect body curved like a parenthesis. Like Lidia, this night inspired words, words that served as a means of objectifying my experience. “I don’t want to forget this,” I thought the next day after we had parted on the side of the road. I wanted to get it all down, but I also wanted to make sense of it. If I wrote the right words, I thought, if I saw it all there in front of me—his toe rubbing against mine on the bed, the tart pop of blueberry pie, the suddenness with which he had reached under the water and inside the wet lip of my bathing suit, his goose-pimpled skin submerged and blue in the moonlight—I could understand it. I needed to give it form. I needed to get it out of my head. So I sat on my bed and wrote and cried and tried to remember everything.

* * *

Does writing help you sort through your experiences, or do you write only after you’ve made sense of your experiences? Are you more like Julia Alvarez who believes that one should wait seven years before writing about an event (an experience, like a wound, she says, needs time to breathe before it is assigned words)? In what ways has narrative helped you process difficult and/or traumatic events in your life? In what ways is your writing therapeutic?

Godspeed, Cut Through the Bone

It's a small, strange feeling to be typing this last post for this month. I'm taking Friday and Monday off for the holidays, and I hope you all do as well, and enjoy the weekend, whether you're particularly patriotic or not.

I have to admit, I'm not sure I've ever gotten to spend so much time with a book since college, and am not sure I've felt as intimate with a bundle of pages in the 5 years now I've been out of school. Looking over the past month, I can't help but make that comparison.

I'm hardly a professor, but what I feel like has happened here in the past month is reminiscent of what used to happen back at Ball State, when we'd spend a few weeks as a class close-reading some book. One class in particular taught by Patrick Collier about Modernist literature of the early 20th century, was structured much the same way. We spent 2-3 weeks reading a novel, coming to class every MWF, and discussing it at great length, reflecting, responding.

But what else has happened here I never found in any class, and perhaps it's due in large part to the openness and vulnerability of Cut Through the Bone, of Ethel's writing, that allowed us to get away from such a clinical, critical approach to the reading. We bared our own bones here this last month, and I'm truly grateful you've all followed along and taken part in the discussions and shared all you've shared.

I have to admit, I had apprehensions leading into the launch of The Lit Pub. Molly and I put a lot of work and thought into this whole endeavor, Molly especially, and with any grand baby like this, there's always the fear of flop and failure. But I don't feel failure in the slightest. Looking back on this month, I see nothing but light.

So thanks to everyone for getting so involved in this, for sharing what you've shared. I've been amazed at the sheer vulnerability of everyone here, and the smart answers to hard questions, and the grace in hard subjects. Thanks so incredibly much to Ethel for being so active in the conversation, and all the ways she helped to push and promote not just her own featured book, but all the work by Molly and Mike this past month at TLP.

I'll be back next Wednesday with a new book (hint: it's from a Chicago press), and I hope we have just as excellent a time with that book as we did with Cut Through the Bone!

Happy holiday weekend everyone! Eat some beer brats (or veggie shish kababs if you're not of the carnivorous persuasion) and enjoy some summer sun!

Chapter 15: Baptismal

Have you seen the book trailer for Lidia Yuknavitch's The Chronology of Water? I’d like to discuss it today because it is so closely tied to Chapter 15: Baptismal. The words you hear Lidia reading as you watch the trailer are taken from this particular chapter, but it is worth noting that Lidia changes a lot of her own words during her voiceover.

Actually, Molly Gaudry was going to try to write this post, but since I kinda do this exact thing for a living, she asked me to write it instead. And since I’m such a nice guy, I agreed. To put that link into context, I’m an ad critic for Adweek Magazine, a journal of record for the ad biz, and their weblog, Adfreak. Now, more than one person has wondered just where the hell I get off critiquing ads when I don’t work in the industry and never have. A fair observation, that. The answer, as far as I know, is that I’m a white straight non-disabled male between the ages of 18 and 35, so literally everyone on the planet Earth has tried to sell me something at least once over the past ten years or so (other consumer groups are targeted by marketers, of course, but my demographic is the sweetest plum). Not having some kind of eye for marketing by this point would violate the law of averages.

My own criteria for what makes an ad work is very simple, and while it saddens me to hold the Chronology trailer to the same standards as Snickers commercials and really bad Vogue photoshops, said criteria applies all the same. Ads, to me, have to answer three basic questions: what is this thing, what does it do, and how will it improve my life?

The Chronology trailer scores high on the first two; the title and author are clearly identified from the start (which sounds elementary, but a lot of ad people live in a weird post-modern bubble where basic details are easily forgotten), and it’s clearly a book. The portion that Lidia reads is well-picked too, in that it’s relatively short and can be understood without much context.

What it doesn’t do is apply the full use of the visual medium to the book’s content, or themes therein. Which is hard to do -- trailers are designed to promote experiences that are immediately, concretely visual, i.e. movies, video games, and television. But guys like Jeff Somers have found the pieces of their novels that can best be visualized and used them as concepts for book trailers, so it can be done. While the Chronology trailer is clear and professional, it doesn’t represent many of the qualities -- rawness, honesty, sexuality, the classically dramatic structure of Lidia’s journey -- that would really sell this book to people.

I mean, if I were to ask you, “What is The Chronology of Water (the book, not the trailer)? What does it do? And how will it improve my life?” you would have some amazing answers, based on comments we’ve seen here in the past. But when we apply these three questions to the trailer, do we feel the same energy in our responses? And, for the trailer to be effective, shouldn’t we?

That’s not to say that the trailer doesn’t try to reel you in -- it does. Watch the trailer with the book in front of you, and read along with Lidia. Notice what words she changes. If the language in the trailer is meant as a lure, the language in the book is the angler fish on the business end of it.

In any case, let me turn it over to you now: Do you think this is an effective book trailer? Do you think book trailers are a useful tool for the publishing industry? More generally, do you think an abstract craft like writing can even be sold cinematically?