Cultural Pig-Out

Just back from feeding the sheep -

Mr Tup on the 'Big Day'

and Mr Tup is looking in fine form. He is a bit grey for a Hebridean but apparently that is allowed when he is more than about 3 years old.

We have done the present thing and got a heap of culture to munch our way through – Sharon has 7hrs and 51 minutes of Jacques Brel footage on DVD thanks to the French version of Amazon (couldn’t find it in the UK). I have a new Ted Hughes CD with some of the short stories on it, plus a copy of Alasdair Reid’s  Selected Poetry and Translations – where, again, the introduction by Douglas Dunn has proved fascinating in its consideration of translated poetry ‘… where poetic translation becomes interesting and aesthetically challenging; it becomes as creative as writing an original poem.’ Which is the upside, I suppose, of the queasy, ‘whose voice is this?’, feeling I always get when reading anything in translation, other than maybe physics. I find just the same questions even with poetry in English, if the work comes from before about 1900, give or take. How much am I spinning into Henryson and Dunbar when I ‘translate’ their poetry into the inside of my head. Everything hinges at least as much on a historical set of values, now maybe unrecoverable, as it does on the precise meaning of words over time.

Still, none of those problems are remotely as intractable as trying to understand what was in the heads of the people who screen 3 simultaneous ‘how to cook the greatest Christmas dinner’ programmes at the time when people are busy cooking Christmas dinner.     Some things will always be a mystery.

David

Greetings from the Grinch

They keep talking about ‘the big day’. Do they mean there are, like, 28 hours this Thursday? I wish there were. The sheep are on holiday twenty minutes walk away up the glen (sort of an 18-30 deal, only with our mate John’s enormous ram) and the ducks are determined to find a new way under the fence each day. I just want to get on with looking at an awesome new poetry manuscript that has come in out of the blue. I’m a real sceptic about love at first sight, so I put it into a pending folder for ten days to see if it kept its charms. Which it did. It feels like tapping on bottles in a dark cellar – and hey! this one’s full.

Sharon has me typesetting next autumn’s novels already – which you know, you just know, means that she is looking lovingly at a new manuscript that, well, couldn’t we just squeeze into 2009? No! Definitely for sure maybe not.   Who needs New Year resolutions.

Have a good, big day. If you’re lucky I’ll post a picture of the tup tomorrow, enjoying his seasonal breakfast of beat pulp and wheat. “That’s ‘Mr Tup’ to you, lad” he says. Take a look and you’ll see what I mean.

David

Christmas presents and building a house from scratch

Five and a half years ago I moved into a house that, a few months earlier, had looked like this (see left). The renovation project on the building that is now the Two Ravens Press global headquarters (yes, we are joking when we say that!) took a huge amount of time and effort and meant that the old house had to be brought right back to the original four stone walls and rebuilt from there. Sometimes, as we construct our vision of what we want our small publishing house to be, it feels as if that’s exactly what we’re doing. We’ve had a few renovation projects with the Two Ravens Press approach to publishing this year, but we think we have a pretty good model now – and a sustainable model – as we move forward.

And as the end of the year approaches we find a couple of very fine things have happened – the perfect Christmas presents. First: David has been spending a fair bit of time grappling with the technology to upload a couple of our book files to a Print on Demand outfit, distributed via Ingrams, in the USA (he blogged briefly about this on December 12) and as a result our very first book is showing ‘in stock’ on Amazon.com, as opposed to the usual 4-6 week period you have to wait in the US to source a book from the UK (all of our books are in stock on Amazon.co.uk, by the way). This book is The Sam Book, Raymond Federman’s memoir of/tribute to Samuel Beckett, which I had the honour of translating from the French, and which we published here in the UK in June. There aren’t many of our books we propose to do this with – we don’t of course own US rights to all of them – but it’s a really useful option when a US publisher for a book can’t be found.

Second: we have finalised a couple of really exciting book projects for the end of 2009. As part of a new push on the literary nonfiction front, with a particular emphasis on nature writing, we have two anthologies coming out at the end of the year. Powerlines will be an anthology of edgy, contemporary writing about fishing, edited by our very own Dexter Petley, whose stunning novel One True Void some of you may remember from January. Then there’ll be an anthology of writing about the relationship between people and wild places (title yet to be determined) edited by Linda Cracknell and with a Foreword by Robert Macfarlane, author of The Wild Places. (Anyone interested in submitting a piece of writing for this anthology, please see our News and Events page).

Then – a really really exciting novel for October, by the incredibly talented Suhayl Saadi, author of the critically-acclaimed Psychoraag. Taking on this book breaks all the resolutions we made when we first started publishing fiction: it is going to end up being about 800 pages long and has been considered by most publishers to be ‘unpublishable’ for that reason. Well, at Two Ravens Press we don’t believe anything is ‘unpublishable’, and the word I hate most of all in the English language is ‘can’t.’ But this is one of the few books I’ve ever read that really does need to be 260,000 words long – it is an astonishing magical realist tour-de-force, spanning continents and sweeping through history. You can be sure that there’ll be more on this book as we progress through the year to come.

And, finally, a couple more interesting novel manuscripts that may make their way onto our list as well: who knows.  A very fine way to end the year: full of enthusiasm for our new projects, and managing for the first time in over two years to find a little breathing space as well!

Sharon

On the Lookout

It is way too early to put up the shutters and hibernate. There’s another week’s work to do yet. But today we got delivery of our last boxes of books for the year – Advance copies of Stona Fitch’s Printer’s Devil. So that feels like crossing some sort of finishing line. That title isn’t released for a couple of months yet (we’ll put the web page up soon) but we needed to get them ahead of the Christmas log-jam so that we are ready to get it reviewed in the Spring. And what a log-jam. I’m normally the only one in our small rural post office to have a crate of parcels to go out at once – but I’m way down the pecking order these last weeks as ‘Auntie Jess’ sends half the Highlands craft output to Australia.

With our heads briefly above water, Sharon is down in Edinburgh sniffing out a new manuscript or two. We always make a point of meeting authors (if that’s at all feasible) before we sign up to each other. The relationship between a very small press and its authors can hover, sometimes uncomfortably, between personal friendship and business contract. Something like a marriage with sales targets.

Seen any good work round here?

Meanwhile the printers have just announced a price increase based on paper and material costs. We’ll have to see how that squeezes the margins in the new year. The balance, as ever hangs on printing lots of books at a reduced unit cost – but can we sell them? – versus printing fewer at significantly reduced profit margins but not having a warehouse full if they don’t fly off the shelves. It was always thus, no doubt. But that is pretty much the single determining business decision that makes TRP work or fail. Of course what we should do is only take on work that is bound to sell. But that is like deciding to only buy shares that are going to go up in value – and is, in effect, what many of the larger publishers are doing. And it would not make for the sort of challenging list that we have always determined to publish.

Still, on the shore at the bottom of the croft I am today reminded that there are other ways of making money. A band of travelling workers are gathering winkles. Not gang labour, they are working for themsleves. I am told that winkles are fetching good prices by being shipped overnight to France and Spain. ‘Good prices’ this end means about £1-50 a sack (looks like about 6/7 kg to me). That is a scoop-load of back-breaking winkle-picking. It would certainly take the investment arm of our local high-street bank a few low tides to get back what they just dumped into a non-existent hedge fund.   

David

Global in Ullapool

Two Ravens Press, physically, is two people, a couple of computers, a distribution contract and a bunch of enthusiasm. Well, I guess the enthusiasm (ours, the writers and the readers)  isn’t strictly physical but it feels like such an integral part of the plan that it is almost material. When something is that stripped down to the chassis of literature, literature, literature – it is really weird to be watching the headlines as Woolies goes down and knowing that we are also financially tied into the outcome. There are two main wholesalers of the UK – at least as far as a small publisher is concerned – and they are Gardners and Bertrams. And Bertrams was/is owned by Woolworths. Owned in some way that allows them to continue trading – I won’t pretend to understand quite how that works, but it does and Bertrams itself is a great company. So we have not only outstanding invoices with Bertrams to consider, but have to decide whether to continue supplying them in the current circumstances. Not that they will particularly notice our presence or absence, I’m sure, amongst the Penguins and Random Houses – but we will notice it!  Which all just goes to show that even an operation on the scale of TRP, run by a couple of enthusiasts who love books, still has to be out there in the business world with the vendors of breakfast cereal and home decor. As a result we do find ourselves doing the (mental) splits sometimes. We can have successive phone calls or e-mails, one from a writer agonising, quite rightly, about whether the font on the cover design is truly in harmony with the spirit of the image, the next from a ’suit’ who may be able to offer us a reduced equivalent unit price based on distribution/brand synchronisation values. Which calls for a certain agility and sense of humour.

While I’m talking about the business side of this Janus - we have just produced our first US version, printed and distributed in the US, for an American author. Basically Print On Demand - but although we might have turned our noses up at that a year ago, on the grounds of book quality, we now find that the book in the hand is pretty indistinguishable from our normal product in terms of print, cover and paper quality. There was absolutely no way we could print in bulk, store and distribute over there without it being POD – so that feels like a real step forward. Plenty of our books have gone across the Atlantic in the post but it never really made sense financially or ecologically not to just send a PDF and have the printing done there.

And finally, though it is too early for end-of-year wrap-ups and sentimentality – we have shifted about 8000+ books in 2008. I bet there is a 50/50 split reading that – half thinking that’s a lot and the others thinking it’s micro. From where we sit it’s ‘coming along’. But not to worry – I’m not about to start giving regular ‘first quarter profit’ forecasts yet. 

David

Guest blog by Alison Napier. Falling on deaf ears: a cautionary tale dedicated to the NHS

Alison Napier is a writer who has contributed to Northwords, New Writing Scotland 26, and two Two Ravens Press anthologies (Riptide and Cleave). She formerly lived in Sutherland, but has recently moved to Devon to study full-time for an MA in Creative Writing.

The term nears its end.  How did these ten weeks fly by so quickly?  Why does life fly by so quickly?  We began in the golden mellow of a Devon autumn and end in the damp and chilly south west winter. 

 

Family phone calls and the Met Office tell me about snowstorms and blocked roads in the far North.  Technology brings Scotland nearer yet oddly also makes it feel much farther away because I can only access it online.  A click to the Northern Times.  Another click to the New York Times.  I sip some cider.

 

I heard Andrew Greig in a workshop saying that it was often far easier to write about a place after you have left it.  I am finding this to be true and am writing about Scotland with a ferocity and vigour.  Suddenly my main character must travel to Sutherland.  She absolutely must. 

 

So why the whimsical tone, student of creative writing?

 

Because I am experiencing a period of sensory overload.  Scotland whooshes through me like the Oykel in spate, and drains away like the Kyle of Tongue.  Exhilarating and exhausting.

 

And because the world has become an EXTREMELY NOISY PLACE.   My favourite café sounds like a war movie, shells exploding all around me, shrieks and yells and a constant roaring overhead.  A child cries in the next county, deafeningly and urgent.  I must rush to the rescue.  A car alarm kicks off and I swivel in terror.  I am being followed by a scrunching rustling stalker. I stop.  He stops.  I identify this is as the sound of my anorak sleeves.

 

You may have guessed by now that I have been fitted with two very efficient digital hearing aids.  I stir my coffee and the teaspoon crashes against the sides of the cup.  I remove it and lay it very carefully on the table, looking furtively around.  My voice booms and echoes in my skull, and I whisper because I sound so loud, so no one hears me when I talk, in an ironic reversal of roles.  I can even hear the crunch of the credit, birling through space, a Ryvita (Multi-Grain) in the Hadron Collider.

 

In the gaps between the chaos I have been given a free glimpse into a hyper-wired world.  Others get this with drugs.  But if I listen carefully I can hear the grass grow and I can hear the clouds bumping gently into each other. Birds whisper, thinking that I cannot hear, spiders weave, their shuttles clacking back and forth, and the red knitted ploughed field breathes a sigh of relief as the early mist rises.

 

Oh yes.  The creative writing course.  Well, I am discovering what my novel is about.  This was aided by having to do a presentation to the class on its genesis, content, and progress to date.  Classmates and tutors asked probing questions and I listened to their comments and my answers with interest.   So I found out lots about it that day.  In addition we have all completed out first assessed piece of work, submitted yesterday, ‘a proposal for a piece of creative writing’.  I wrote about my novel.  As opposed to writing my novel.

 

And now all I want to do is to finish it.  But instead I have to write a 4000-word essay and complete a writer’s notebook by mid-January.  And therein lies the conundrum of the creative writing course.  The clever thing would be to do both.  And maybe I will.

 

Finally, may I wish everyone a pleasant festive season despite the economic glooms, and a harmonious and creative 2009.  And for total peace and tranquillity, simply remove both hearing aids.  Splendid!

The further demise of the book review…

… is predicted by Robert McCrum in The Observer today.  “The book world is in full-blown transition,’ he says. ‘Blogs are rampant; Google is digitising every text going; e-readers are transforming the experience of reading. Books (and book reviewing) have been pushed to the margin. It doesn’t help that in a global recession publishing is also feeling the pinch.”

It’s an interesting question, whether blogs really are supplanting professional critical reviewing. I’m a big fan of really good serious literary blogs, which take the level of discussion about books to a place that a typical review, no matter how well done, can’t. A blog enables you to have a debate about books: what worked for you as a reader and what didn’t, and that’s a very valuable thing. It’s valuable to writers, as well as other readers. It gets people talking about ideas in a way that they probably haven’t since they studied literature at school (or maybe I was just unusual in being fortunate enough to have had seriously good quality literature teaching at school!) 

But these features of a blog aren’t the only thing that’s valuable, and even the best of blogs serves a different function from a good review by a professional critic in the literary press. Sure, we’ve railed against the bad reviews and reviewers in the past – the ones that don’t live up to the responsibilities of a professional reviewer – who, after all, is being paid to do a job properly, fairly and accurately.  But they are in the minority and there are bad book blogs too.  It seems to me that both are needed. The rise of the literary blog is a fine thing, but it would be a great pity indeed if it were at the expense of the professional critical review.

There are other issues that McCrum takes up:  ”At Houghton Mifflin Harper, in a damaging outburst of candour, a company spokesperson revealed that, with rare exceptions, editors were being encouraged not to acquire new books. Günter Grass and Philip Roth, both with this publisher, can be expected to write at will. But for any new writer, or worse, a novelist in mid-career, these are the times that try men’s souls,” he says. More evidence that the typical agent’s cry these days - ”I can’t sell literary fiction any more” - is based on a very real problem.

McCrum also talks about the rise of the bestseller at the expense of the ’smaller’ book – a good literary novel or literary memoir. Again, something we’ve spoken of often in this blog in the past. He ends on a high note, predicting that the current economic downturn might ”purge the trade of vacuous bestsellers and bring the British reading public back to better books.” But it’s difficult to see how. The truth is that, with a few notable exceptions, it’s the independent presses that are increasingly publishing the majority of risk-taking, quality literary books these days. We are the ones that those first-time novelists and mid-career literary ‘mid-list’ authors turn to when the big guys cut even more of them out. But the downturn affects us too. In a business that is already heavily discounted, and where people are, even in a time of relative economic ease, increasingly price-sensitive and prone to bargain-hunting, where typical book-buying behaviour is to purchase only from the ‘3 for 2′ tables, is it really likely that people are going to pay an extra couple of pounds on an undiscounted cover price to buy the kind of literature that is only available from small presses, who can only afford to operate on a full-price, high-quality, small volume model?

There’s certainly no evidence of it yet. But who knows how things may shift. It’s going to be interesting finding out!

Sharon

Meanderings

Old Lady's last days

What a strange week it’s been. After many days of freezing temperatures, ice and snow (unheard of in the pre-Christmas season on the West coast – for a good few decades, at least) our drive is still like an ice skating rink. We have to scramble up the high bank at the back of the house to get in and out – though fortunately we managed to get the cars up there earlier in the week, before it got really bad. Feeding the geese and sheep yesterday morning meant sliding on my backside all the way down the field to the byre and crawling on hands and knees from there to the various feed troughs (all this, of course, while David was enjoying the sights and sounds and liquid refreshments available in Thurso…) Oddly the sheep seemed quite happy to share their breakfast with a suddenly-diminished human, brought right down to their level, and just crowded around me as if it was all perfectly normal. Nobody offered me a piece of beet pulp, though … And to cap it all, the Old Lady died. No, not some neighbour or aunt, but an elderly araucana hen who has been with me since I first moved here and started keeping hens, back in 2003. She had a very good life and laid some very fine eggs and was very tame by the end, but it was sad to see her go. For the couple of days before she died she’d been staggering around the field as if she’d had a sherry too many, but it didn’t stop her running for the grain when it came to early evening feeding time. Hens, surprisingly perhaps, do have little characters all of their own, and she was a big character in the chicken world.

Meanwhile, on the publishing front … still fairly quiet days here, punctuated only by A Big Event in the publishing world as two of the major book wholesalers in the country, both part of the Woolworths group, look likely to go bust, taking a whole whack of publishers’ money along with them. EUK stocks books mostly on behalf of the big supermarkets, so there’s no issue there for someone like Two Ravens Press, but it’s certainly threatened to hurt a bunch of the bigger publishers in a big way. Bertrams, one of two main non-supermarket book wholesalers in the country (the other being Gardners) seems so far to be holding its own, which is good news for the rest of us. Bertrams buy a fairly large number of our books on behalf of bookstores, but because they don’t hold our books in stock (as Gardners do) happily we have little exposure to losses if they do go under – maybe an unpaid invoice for a dozen books or so, but that’s it. Still, it is a scary thing.

Meanwhile, the Telegraph has downgraded the role of its literary editor along with the departure of Sam Leith, which will almost certainly result in smaller amounts of book coverage – a worrying trend in major US newspapers that looks set to continue over here. Happily the Times Group, Independent group and Guardian/Observer groups are still going strong with lots of good book coverage – but you have to wonder for how long.

Strange days.

Sharon

I claim the record

… the record for fastest mail order delivery, that is. On Wednesday I was going up to Thurso to see George Gunn about his next collection and to plunder his extensive library of Scottish literature. When we are going away for even a short time we always try to clear the decks of Paypal orders through our website and similar orders – since there are no staff to do the work if we don’t, and we hate to keep people waiting. Anyway, an order came in as I was about to leave and I spotted that it was to an address literally just on the Thurso road I was about to drive. So the lady got her book a few hours after ordering it, with a tip of my delivery boy’s cap. ”That was quick!”

Thurso was its usual larger-than-life self – I got to hear about Norse traditions in poetry over a pint, see their brand new museum – complete with some of George’s poetry on the walls - then go to a bursting-at-the-seams Scotia Review writer’s group, then, well it all fades into a near-Orcadian bit of a blur after that. This morning I woke up in George’s spare room and coaxed myself back to reality with a read of Macdiarmid’s A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle.  It started to get a bit too reflexive at that stage, leaving me staring out of the kitchen window at Dunnet Head. Which tends to put things in their place soon enough. More sense tomorrow.

David

Strange things

Geese sleep on one leg

We are having a fairly quiet time on the publishing front right now from the book production and events perspective – December always is quiet for publishers of literary work, since most people seem to want a celebrity biography in their Christmas stocking much more than they want a book of poetry! – which is one of the reasons why our last books of the year are published mid-November. And so it’s time to slowly sink back into my own writing again after a few distracted weeks doing other things. It’s strange how hard it is to get back into the writing rhythm after a longish break – almost as if the work (which by now has for sure taken on an independent life of its own in my mind) turns its back on you in a huff and has to be slowly cajoled into cooperating once again.

This time is especially difficult because during the break from it I had an epiphany – which means quite a bit of going back to the beginning and restructuring. A curious phenomenon, the literary epiphany, as those of you who are writers will know only too well. They seem to strike out of the blue, but really they don’t. I could perhaps have predicted mine if I’d been a bit more awake to what was going on in my own head and if I’d thought a little bit more carefully about why it was exactly that I was quite reluctant to get back to the novel again. Sometimes that’s just laziness or fatigue: it can be a very very hard thing to write your way into the world of the novel afresh each day, even when you’re on a roll. But sometimes it’s more than that. When it goes on for a long time people call it writer’s block – but I have to admit I don’t believe in the idea (oh, give yourself a few more years, I hear the more experienced among you say :- ) To me, that reluctance to engage with a piece of writing doesn’t need a whole new ’syndrome’ to describe it - it almost always just means that what you’re doing isn’t working. Something doesn’t feel right. Something needs to be fixed. And for me, that macro-level fixing always seems to go on in the background. It’s never something I can just sit down and work through – it simply happens, while I’m doing other things. And if I leave well enough alone and don’t try to force anything … well, an epiphany (a major problem solved) can be the result.

The particular epiphany I had related to what David referred to the other day as the ‘civil engineering’ that holds a piece of work together. And that’s always perhaps the hardest – and the most fun and rewarding, when it’s going well – part. For me that’s also always the most challenging part, as I love complicated narrative structures. This time around I was convinced I was going to write something very simple and pared down – a very fine thought, since The Long Delirious Burning Blue is 130,000 words long and has two narrators, in two different countries, each with fairly complicated narrative structures including significant flashbacks to a shared past. But it’s not to be. The new work keeps slipping away from me, twisting itself up and folding back on itself and forming extra layers … and, much as admire writers of very simple pared-down narratives whose very simplicity is actually their complexity (like Alice Thompson’s The Falconer, for example) that just doesn’t seem to be what I write. And if I try too hard to force it, then everything starts to feel contrived and that reluctance to engage starts to set in…

And that ability to step back from a work in progress and focus on something else and just let it all churn away for a while is, I think, one reason why I’m glad to combine writing with publishing and crofting, and why becoming a full-time writer would likely become way, way too much of a pressure. (And, if nothing else, having to concentrate sometimes on the other stuff provides a never-ending stream of very fine excuses for slower-than-expected progress :- )

Sharon