NIGHT MOVES and the Pitiful State of the American Literary Man
Guess what, my friends? NIGHT MOVES is out!
I want to talk about why this book is important. First, let me pull something from the submission guidelines of a major literary magazine:
This magazine actively seeks out and supports work by and about those often marginalized in literary spaces, including Black and Indigenous people, and people of color; trans people, cis women, agender, gender non-conforming, genderqueer, two-spirit, and non-binary people; intersex people, LGBQA (lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer, asexual/aromantic) people, people with disabilities, and especially people living at the intersection of those identities.
You may think this is beyond parody, and it is, but there is a statement like this on the website of pretty much every literary magazine in the country.
The thing is that there may have been a time when these sorts of folks were underrepresented when fiction writing was dominated by white men. Now, white men are exceedingly rare in the literary world. Alex Perez has written about the “pitiful state of the American literary man.” I am a straight, white, middle-aged, ex-military, ex-Wall Street, rich, conservative male. Yahtzee. In my defense, I am a childless cat lady.
In the push for diversity, certain voices have been excluded, and certain writing styles have been excluded as well. “Masculine” writing, the kind of writing I do, is no longer sought after. From Alex at “The American Man Is the Problem”:
You’re probably thinking that when I say “American man” I mean an explicitly political figure, perhaps even a right-winger. The people who hate the American man certainly think this because they conflate any kind of Americanism with conservatism, but that’s not what I mean when I use the label. It has less to do with patriotism or overt Americana aesthetics—even though I don’t mind them—and more to do with a swaggering American voice and style. The American man I’m talking about may be a conservative or a liberal or apolitical, but that’s not what matters most to him. It’s about audacity and courage and ridiculousness and love and beauty and the willingness to fall flat on your face and embarrass yourself in the service of your art. It’s Henry Miller. It’s Ralph Ellison. It’s Phillip Roth. It’s Barry Hannah. It’s Truman Capote. It’s Charles Portis. It’s James Alan McPherson. It’s all those truly vulnerable, beautiful boys. The haters despise the American man because anything American is now tinged with all manner of awfulness in their minds; it’s a loaded political term to many of the ultra-progressives that thrive in the literary scene. America is bad, and so a man who identifies as an American man, is obviously an unpublishable cretin who should be shunned. But I’m talking about something much grander than politics. I’m talking about the American spirit. But they probably hate that more than anything else.
Create Some Buzz!
I am an American man. I write with audacity and courage and ridiculousness and love and beauty and the willingness to fall flat on my face and embarrass myself in service to my art. I am comfortable saying that if this were 1994, I would probably be getting published. Yes, this is a self-published book. It is an extraordinary self-published book. My characters writhe with intensity. I have stories—real stories with a beginning, middle, and end. The endings don’t have to be satisfying, but there are endings. People die. People cry. The stories are about love and life and happiness and tragedy and everything in between.
I sent out 12 stories to 100 different literary magazines, and I was rejected at all of them except for one where I had a personal relationship with the editor. I got positive feedback from a few, and I got close to publication with one of them. Still, it was very dispiriting. I read the stuff these magazines publish. It is... postmodern—that’s how I would characterize it.
I am working my way through the latest installment of The Best American Short Stories series. There is not much to get excited about. Sales of literary fiction have been declining for years. Now, the only people who read literary fiction are people who write literary fiction. Writers are writing for other writers, not for readers. It is one big fart-smelling echo chamber.
You might recall that in February, I went to AWP, the writers’ conference in Kansas City. I went there to pitch my book to indie publishers. Boy, those were some awkward conversations.
Basically, I was telling them that I was a throwback to the ’90s, like John Updike and Barry Hannah, writing plot-heavy stories with characters as intense and volatile as their surroundings. I could tell that I was making people uncomfortable. I told one woman that at one of the indie presses, and she looked at me dead in the eye and said, “I think you’re going to have a hard time selling that.” I wasn’t too happy with that answer, but at least she was being honest.
There is zero demand for my style of writing, or for me as a person. I am, as Alex puts it, an unpublishable cretin.
But you know what? It’s going to work out for the best. Most of these indie presses don’t know how to publish a book—the books are janky, the covers are amateurish, and the page design is primitive. I’m looking around at this writers’ conference and these terrible books stacked up on the tables and said to myself, screw you Joe Boo, I will do it myself. And this book will sell 10 times as many copies as any of these traditionally published books. And if it gets into the right hands...
And that’s where you come in. Buy the book. Read the book. Review the book. And most importantly, talk about the book. And if you really, really love it, buy a bunch and hand them out. What I’m looking for is buzz. Can you create some buzz? That is how the book will succeed.
It needs to succeed because all the right people will be mad about it. If NIGHT MOVES really took off and got the attention of some tastemaking literary blog or magazine or podcast, there would be some soul-searching about how all these stories were rejected for publication in the traditional outlets. I can tell you that there is a market for this kind of writing—people ache for it. Writing is not an intellectual exercise. It is not a game—it is art. It should make you feel something.
This Revolution Requires Your Participation
Anyway, that’s enough out of me. One of these days, the pendulum will swing back the other way, and I’ll get published again. I’ll lob a few more hand grenades into the lit mags in a year or two. I have more stories in me. And I have a novel, too, which is going to be interesting.
I’m not saying that everything I do is amazing—sometimes, I really do artistically fall flat on my face. But I am incapable of writing crap. I know what it takes to get published, and I refuse to do it. I could imitate the style, but I won’t.
This revolution requires your participation. Buy the book, and enjoy it. Recommend it to your friends. Talk about it online. Hell, even give me a review on Amazon. I am not the best fiction writer in the world—far from it. But I may be one of the best storytellers, which you will find out soon.
I really hope you enjoy NIGHT MOVES. Buy it here.
Jared Dillian, MFA