More Life

[susanstinson]

Spinsters Ink, which published my first two novels, is in the process of closing. This, sadly, is due in part to the serious illness of the current publisher, Sharon Silvas. It's also part of the larger trend of the disappearance of many feminist publishers, bookstores, and journals that made up much of the context in which I first became a published writer, and where the great majority of readers have found my work.

My most recent book was published by Firebrand, itself revived from closure by Karen Oosterhous after publishing some of the most powerful, influential and well-loved books in recent feminist literary history, books by Dorothy Allison, Shay Youngblood, Les Feinberg, Cheryl Clarke, Cherrie Moraga, Beth Brant, Minnie Bruce Pratt, Kitty Tsui, Jewelle Gomez, Judith Katz and Alison Bechdel among them. Oh, I read these books with such voraciousness and desire, steaming up my glasses with urgent language and hot, hot, hot aspirations. Many of these books are still available from Firebrand, mind you, and I'm proud to be published by this press, and to have my work on a list with such great history and such really fine new work.

One of the gifts that small, independent presses give their authors is that the books often stay in print for much longer than at larger houses. But now my first book, Fat Girl Dances with Rocks, is out of print. I only have seven copies (including two I just bought secondhand over the internet) left, so if I'll have to be very selective if I want to show the book to anyone. There are more copies of Martha Moody. There is always the possibility of new life for these books – new editions or new ways to distribute existing copies – but, for now, I just want to say that I love them enormously, and I love what I know about the life they've had in the world, and in the brains and dreams of individual readers, some of you dear to me on my friends list. I wish them more life.

Comments

[arielblue.livejournal.com]

Oh no! I hadn't heard about Spinsters Ink closing. That's so sad. Damn.

The happier news is that I'm looking at WorldCat right now, and Fat Girl Dances with Rocks is available at 206 libraries worldwide, so anyone who has access to a good library can at least borrow it via interlibrary loan. (Which I'm about to do, myself.) True, you don't get money from it, but at least know that the book is out there waiting for new readers still!

I have so many Firebrand books on my shelves ... when I volunteered at our local feminist bookstore (before it went the way of too many feminist bookstores & closed) I ended up buying almost everything they published. I didn't love every single one, but they were always one of the most consistent presses out there. I've been out of touch a bit with feminist publishing since Aquarius closed, I'm afraid. I know I can get stuff on the internet, but it's so much easier to wander into a bookstore, sit in an easy chair, say hi to various women wandering in and out, and browse through books for a couple of hours. Damn, but I miss that bookstore.

[susanstinson.livejournal.com]

Hadn't thought of that -- I'll have to remember to recommend interlibrary loan. Libraries are such fabulous and generous lenders and protectors of books. I've always liked librarians, but ever since I read The Giant's House and hearing about the ways librarians are quietly defending the reading of their patrons against violations of civil liberties, well, that's blosssomed into ardent admiration.

Fat Girl Dances with Rocks and Martha Moody both got glowing reviews in journals for librarians. Venus of Chalk wasn't released in time for that to happen, so I worry that librarians don't know about it, and so it won't have the same shelter from future silences. If you had a chance to look it up at WorldCat, I'd be interested to know whether it's out there or not.

And, yeah, of course the not-getting-paid-livelihood problem matters to me -- it comes up over and over and over. Knock on wood, I just keep piecing solutions together, pushing to do the work I love, and hope for the best.

[arielblue.livejournal.com]

Well, Venus of Chalk is only in 6 libraries right now, unfortunately. (Although not every library in the country is represented in WorldCat.) In case you're curious, the winners are: Iowa State, Oak Park Public Library in Illinois, MIT, Albuquerque Public Library, Cleveland Public Library, and Penn State. At least it's in some good ones, for what that's worth!

There's also sometimes considerable lagtime (several months anyway) in getting books catalogued & on the shelf, so it's very possible more libraries have the book sitting around awaiting processing. When I had a poem in a university press anthology last year, I got all obsessive and checked WorldCat every few days (and then every few weeks when that got tiresome) to see if more libraries had added it. Libraries kept trickling in for months -- and I checked tonight and it's up to 128, which is way more than there were six months ago. So all is not lost.

I'm really interested in the problem of how to get small-press books into libraries -- it's hard for librarians to know about them unless they're super familiar with the particular field and are able to spend quite a bit of time reading reviews and such. In big libraries, so much of the selection work happens via automatic approval plans that are set up with major vendors like Baker & Taylor, Elsevier, etc. and librarians don't have enough time to do super-hands-on, labor-intensive selection work. And small presses, of course, don't have the big bucks to do publicity and send out tons of review copies. Someday I hope to have a job that grants me time for a little research so I can work on some stuff around this. Of course one way to do it is to identify really narrow areas of specialization -- like if a faculty member at the State University of Northwest Podunk has a strong research interest in contemporary lesbian fiction about small towns, the library there might collect it more comprehensively and manage to pick up a lot of the small-press stuff. My dream job would be to do that with contemporary poetry in a library somewhere -- goodness knows I already sit around obsessively keeping track of who's winning the various dinky literary prizes, because I want to be one of those people! *heh*

[susanstinson.livejournal.com]

Thanks a lot for looking that up -- it's what I suspected, and it's useful to know for sure (hey, look, Becca -- MIT.) Booklist -- I think it was Booklist, or it might have been Library Journal -- had a reviewer who really loved my first two books, but the magazine also has a requirement that they receive galleys three months before the publication date, and my current publisher doesn't do galleys, so there was no review. The same thing happened with Publisher's Weekly, which is a big gateway to being reviewed in the mainstream press.

It's true that it's possible that some copies have been ordered and are waiting to be catalogued, because some reviews that folks who order for libraries might have read, like one in the Women's Review of Books, have come in recently, but I think that most librarians simply haven't heard about it. And, yeah, if you have suggestions about that, I'd be very interested.

Hmm, but it's sinking in, what you're saying, that many librarians don't have the time to do labor-intensive selection work, and rely on automatic approval plans with major vendors. (That concentration of information stuff is so scary!) Still, Fat Girl Dances With Rocks didn't have a major distributor like that... (but it was an early and unusual use of Fat Girl in the title, so maybe it was easy to spot that way, and Spinsters had a good catalogue at that time...) *Anyway,* thanks a lot for taking the trouble to look that up for me, and all the best for your research and poetry library dreams -- charlottecooper says that there's a great poetry library in London -- and for reeling in one of those various dinky but also glorious literary prizes one day.

[arielblue.livejournal.com]

Another difference between the Spinsters books and this one might be the recent-ish history of Firebrand. I wouldn't be surprised if Spinsters is/was on some approval plans, and Firebrand may have been too, but when the word was that they were going under, a lot of libraries may have removed them and not put them back on. I'm gonna test this theory a bit by going over to WorldCat...

OK, I can't remember what year it was when Firebrand was in transition, but here is fiction published by Firebrand in 2000 and later, and how many libraries own each:

Bleeding out : a mystery / Clare, Baxter, 1959- (268)
And then they were nuns : a novel / Leonardi, Susan J., 1946- (40)
Dish it up, baby! : a novel / Helms, Kristie (8)
Venus of chalk : a novel / Stinson, Susan, 1960- (6)

And that's it. But, fiction they published in the 1980s and 1990s was collected by quite a few libraries, like The Fires of Bride (1988) which is in 186 libraries. So *something* changed over the years, and there are a lot of possible factors -- library budgets suck a lot more than they used to, fewer indie bookstores, harder to get mainstream reviews for small-press stuff, etc. -- but it also wouldn't surprise me if some of the vendors/distributors and/or relevant librarians don't know Firebrand is publishing (still/again). I'm gonna re-sort the full list by date and see what that looks like...

Okay, now I wish I knew what year things went nuts with Firebrand. There is definitely a sharp drop-off after 2000; a lot of stuff they put out in 2000 was still collected by quite a few libraries, but after that, phbt. (Although Post-Dykes to Watch Out For is only held by 86 libraries! And it came out in 2000. Okay, that's a crime.) One exception is The Price of Passion: An Erotic Journey by Jess Wells, held by only 23 libraries, but I can see where a lot of librarians would shy away from ordering something with a title like that.(Not that they *should*, but it's logical that it would be the case.)

Jeez, I'm a geek. Anyway, if this info/speculation would be useful to anyone at Firebrand, do feel free to pass it along; maybe there's something they could be doing differently.

Meanwhile, keep writing -- that's the important part. :)

[susanstinson.livejournal.com]

Thanks again -- really interesting. And then they were nuns was the first new book published after Firebrand was reopened. The author is an academic, and so has access to those networks where the other books are less visible, and the book has been out longer and was nominated for a lammie, so all of that probably helped, but I'm remembering, too, that it had the actual cataloguing data in the front of the book, while in each of the later books, it says, "An application for cataloging has been filed with the Library of Congress," but the info itself isn't there. Is that a factor in whether or not librarians order the book, do you think? (It's something I flagged in the proofing process, but an author only has so much control...) Writers have more incentive to care about libraries (on this smallish scale, anyway) than publishers do, because it's not so much about sales as about readers and the longterm survival of the possibility of reading the book.

Thanks so much for all of your help. If you've got time to give me the numbers on Martha Moody, too, I'd be really interested. I'm about to get access to the last copies of that book, and am considering the best thing(s) to do with them, and this conversation makes me want to consider a library strategy, if the numbers are low, although that might not work so long after the publication date.

[reinventedmuse.livejournal.com]

I still have my well loved/dog eared copies of both "Fat Girl dances with rocks" and "Martha Moody".

I got "Fat Girl dances with rocks" at a bookstore in Ann Arbor.. and when I first saw the book I was so amazed/impressed that someone had actually cared enough to right a book featuring a girl of size & strength. That book meant so much to my coming out & of age years.

Then Martha Moody..
I recognized your name when I was at a Womyns Perogative in Ferndale, I was in love with the idea of the book, & it was even better when I read it. I wanted to know a womyn like Martha, wanted to fall in love with her... so what can I say? Martha Moody is such a beautiful book to me.

Through the years I just wanted you to know that i've loved both books well :) Thank you so much for being such a wonderful, talented writer & beautiful soul.

[susanstinson.livejournal.com]

Thank you so much, reinventedmuse, for telling me so plainly that you've loved both books well, and that they've been important to you. Oh yeah, of course I cared about writing about the lives of fat girls and women. The fact that I'm fat has been such a central part of my physical and emotional and cultural life.

also

[reinventedmuse.livejournal.com]

I am soo sorry to hear about Spinsters Ink closing. They are/were such a wonderful publishing company.

[ericaceous.livejournal.com]

sad about spinsters ink. Sturgeon and I have one of the copies of Fat Girl Dances with Rocks! WE have lent it to people! PLus the libraries. Far Girl Dances on!

[ericaceous.livejournal.com]

argh. sorry about typo city. Fat girl dances on.

[susanstinson.livejournal.com]

Yay! Here's to dancing on.

But, you know, it's a pretty fair number of folks who have told me that they read that book in high school, when they needed it most, and I really do wish that it was still going to be right there in the bookstores for them to find.

PS I have on exciting new long socks over my velvet courdoroy tights from the eighties that somebody handed down to me a while ago to help me weather today's ice and drizzle storm, thanks to your good knee sock questions and the expertise of alwaysindrag.

[ericaceous.livejournal.com]

Yeah. I was a library kid, but most people are not at that age. I hope it gets picked up somehow. The publishing situation now is really disturbing and sad and sort of terrifying, really.

Are your socks the "original long socks"? I have not bought any myself yet because I am suffering from some post-holiday travel brokeness. But soon.

[susanstinson.livejournal.com]

The publishing situation is very, very tough and very, very scary. Makes me so sad it's hard to talk about it.

But then there are there is the spread of small independent publishers, so if enough of us shake lose from the grip of mass media to find them and sustain them, amazing work can stay available.

Yes, the original long socks. I bought some of the longer ones, too. They were too tight above my knee, so I'm wearing them doubled over -- very warm and comfy and they absolutely are staying up on me. I was sad not to be able to have the warm thigh thing, too, but the width measurements on the site told the truth. I hear you about the no money thing, though.