I’m writing because I know that writers will read this poor excuse for a poem
And pass judgment on me, a publisher,
And I know that I am here to take a bullet
For all writers who get rejected by publishers like me
And they can’t do anything, not one fucking thing, about it.

I’m writing because my thick skin will protect me
From criticism and silence.
And I know that my nephew and niece from Russia
And my daughter from Romania
Will not hold any of this against me.
Their adoptions far exceed any concern I have
About writing a poem.
Any excuse for a poem.
And I can fuss
And fret
And still it matters none
When compared
To my concern
About how it feels
To adopt a child
And how I feel
About the frustrations
Of Writing.
My concerns
About raising a toddler
And my fears
About writing.

This is my life then.
One concern
After another,
No real worry,
Really,
As writing,
Creating,
Can never compare
To raising a child,
Rearing a human from an early stage of development.
Sad, really, to think that evolution ever had a chance.

The submission,
I’m afraid,
Just wasn’t that good
To begin with.

© 2011, Dan Cafaro. All rights reserved.

That’s why it came as somewhat of a surprise when my publisher, Atticus Books, asked me if I had any preference regarding the font in which Tracks, my debut novel in stories, would be typeset.

How is it possible I’ve read these billions and billions of words and seldom given any thought to their font?

For my decades of writing, I’ve pretty much stuck to three fonts (or four if you include dot-matrix): Times New Roman, Arial, and Courier (the last of which I haven’t used in years and only then because it looked to me like typewriter print).

As it turns out, font happens to be something Atticus Books does think about, quite a bit. In fact, each book they’ve published so far has been set in a different font. Now that’s something to get keyed-up about!

John Minichillo’s debut novel, The Snow Whale, currently in production and due to arrive on July 30, has Atticus Books publisher Dan Cafaro thinking “playfully hard” about fonts.

“Because John’s book [The Snow Whale] is a quirky, contemporary retelling of Herman Melville’s classic, Moby-Dick, there’s a rich history of font selections, such as the Arion Press edition, to consider,” Cafaro said. “The documentation of that history has proven both inspirational and influential as we narrow our field of [typeface] choices.”

For those keeping score at home, here’s a rundown of the different typefaces used for the main body text in each Atticus Books title:
Alex Kudera’s Fight for Your Long Day: Garamond
Joseph Zeppetello’s Daring to Eat a Peach: Janson (Text-Roman)
Randy DeVallance’s The Absent Traveler: Baskerville (Roman)
Steve Himmer’s The Bee-Loud Glade: Berling
Tommy Zurhellen’s Nazareth, North Dakota: Fairfield
JM Tohline’s The Great Lenore: Minion
Eric D. Goodman’s Tracks: ?

So, which will it be for mine?

Over the past weeks I’ve spent some time reading about fonts, putting passages of Tracks into different fonts, and trying to figure out what fonts I like best. Of course, in rooting around the Internet, you notice entire blogs dedicated to typography and various books, too, such as Just My Type by Simon Garfield and Type: The Secret History of Letters by Simon Loxley.

It seems appropriate that a book be set in a font that fits the mood of the story. Perhaps a story about an old newspaper man in an old-fashioned courier, or an absurdist comedy in comic sans, or a computers-take-over-the-world futuristic fantasy in a sans serif.

But in most cases, it’s a little difficult, finding the font that fits.

Regardless of what anyone likes, I think the number one factor is that it be easy to read. The best fonts don’t call attention to themselves.

What’s your take on typeface? Do you have a favorite font?

Source of FONT graphic: allgraphicsonline.com

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Eric D. Goodman is an American writer of literary fiction, commercial fiction, childrens’ literature, and non-fiction. He writes a weekly “Lit Bit” column for Gather and a “Literary Life” column for Coloquio. His debut novel-in-stories, TRACKS will be released June 30, 2011.

© 2011, Eric D. Goodman. All rights reserved.

My family had had personal computers since I was eleven or twelve, and I had even used our Apple IIe to compose documents in high school, but word processors in the eighties were clunky programs, the computer monitors often monochrome and unable to handle fonts or sub/superscripts, the printers almost universally dot-matrix. And in 1986, I was sent away to college with the cutting edge of writing technology: a Webster’s desk-set dictionary and thesaurus, and an electric Daisywheel typewriter with erasable ink. I spent my first year of college clacking out mediocre papers with the Daisywheel that I was too exhausted to revise or edit after the first presentable draft. Writing, to me in those days, was equivalent to typing. And typing was the equivalent of inscribing words in stone. Yes, the ink was erasable, but if you didn’t catch the edit right away, there was almost never a good way to simply erase and replace a word. Editing entire phrases or sentences was almost always out of the question. The thought problem for me, as a young student, was getting the words to behave as if they were static, when my own understanding of the ideas was still in flux.

After a year of writing this way, I discovered there was a computer lab in the building right across from my dorm. For a dollar I could buy a floppy disk and I didn’t have to draft on notepads anymore. I could revise and edit on the fly. I would use the same clunky word processor I’d used on my parent’s computer at home. The trade-off was well-worth it and soon I got better at learning the commands. I don’t remember the papers getting all that much better, but I felt better about the process.

And then something else happened. When I started to write, for myself, when I started writing stories—I had a place to go to now to do that. And so when my other friends went off to the rec. center or to study in the library, sometimes I would go to the computer center to write. There were signs up that made it clear that the computers were reserved for homework only, but I knew no one would be able to tell what my writing was or wasn’t. I wasn’t playing a videogame, which some people did, at least until they got kicked out. And in those days, when there was no Internet, playing a videogame meant bringing your own program and loading it up, which people did. They owned games without owning a computer? Yes. The same way that I was now writing without owning a computer.

My first computer was an early generation IBM with a monochrome monitor and one of my parent’s old dot-matrix printers. I could use the printer for drafts, and walk to the computer center when I wanted to print a finished copy on the laser printer at five cents per page. It was a used computer I found in a classified ad and I paid several hundred dollars for it, much too much even then. It only had a megabyte of memory and I loaded up my clunky word processor, the only program I’d ever put on that computer. And for years I was happy. I had a writing sanctuary in my apartment. I was accumulating stories and was starting to fill up floppy disks. Instead of walking to the computer center I only had to walk to my room. Instead of just writing, now I spent hours editing and rewriting. A friend told me about a graduate writing program in his hometown where a semi-famous author taught. He gave me a goal. I was really enjoying myself, and that was just the beginning.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
John Minichillo’s work has appeared in Mississippi Review, Third Coast, Smokelong Quarterly, Necessary Fiction, Wigleaf, decomP, and lots of other very cool places. He has work forthcoming at FRiGG, Emprise Review, Triple-Quick Fiction, and Hint Fiction: an Anthology of Stories in Twenty-Five Words or Fewer. He lives in Nashville with his wife and son where they promote the writing of fiction whether there’s time or not. John’s debut novel The Snow Whale will be released by Atticus Books in the summer of 2011.

Photo Sources:
Macintosh, Aresluna.org

© 2011, John Minichillo. All rights reserved.

KENSINGTON, MD — I heard from a writer that today is National Writing Day. You’d think as a publisher, I would have known that or heard about it before dinnertime, but at least the entire light of day hasn’t gotten past me.

So what makes today any different than, say, yesterday? I mean, if you’re a writer, then every day should be National Writing Day, right? Um, er, well, if you’re like me, then the guilt and remorse that accompany that statement—if, in fact, you don’t write every day—should be enough to make you gag on your overcooked bratwurst.

National Writing Day indeed is a cruel holiday for those as undisciplined and divided as me, a lapsed, pro-embryonic stem cell-extracting Catholic who eats meat on Good Friday and wouldn’t know a moral dilemma if it hit him square in the testicles.

And if you’re not a writer, then you probably equate writing with a grueling, mind-numbing task, an unbalanced checkbook or a grocery list. Or perhaps you see it as an arcane art practiced by your Windowless ancestors and, like the Caribbean Monk Seal and Humpback Whale, the act of writing for writing’s sake appears Kevorkian-like ready to join a Wikipedia list of things endangered, soon-to-be mercifully extinct.

That is, if you’re like most people who haven’t much patience, nor aptitude, for the stodgy, sacred rules of the stodgy, sacred English language, you probably prefer texting to writing e-mails. You opt to text, not because you can’t write, but you figure it gives you an out, an excuse for those nerdy friends who critically read entire messages and quietly edit them, thinking that they’re saving civilization in the process.

So, on this Day of National Writing, I declare a war on words. Let’s face it: The art of letter writing, people, is passé, mostly because it requires time and effort, and if you haven’t noticed lately, those are in short supply today.

And, of course, that old tired act of writing longhand is deader than a California Condor. Ink, paper, legible handwriting … all wasteful and all nonsense! These primitive tools and that painstakingly learned elementary school skill simply have no place anymore in this modern age of Google-engorged gadgetry.

So I say goodbye and good riddance to National Writing Day. With apologies to The Graduate (though with the occupation of writing all but kaput, little does plagiarism matter):

“I just want to say one word to you. Just one word. Are you listening?”

Gigabytes. There’s a great future in gigabytes.

Think about it. Will you think about it?

Enough said.

TTYL.

© 2010 – 2011, Dan Cafaro. All rights reserved.

i feel inspired by a more than capable comrade (who has written observations on poets and poetry titled ‘how to be a poet. for idiots.’) to issue forth observations on gooder writing. i have from time to time been known to offer something or other to those who seek it. not all of this something or other is understandable, however, and based on the cloistered nature of the human brain (meaning yours) this is not surprising. but due to my philoprogenitive nature i rise above the tendency of most ‘writers’ to horde and shall therefore generously particularize the monads of gooder writing for you (always for you) in this introduction.

i. addressing the fundamental flaws in your approach

- the notion that gooder writing can be learned is false.

- the notion that reading can help you become a gooder writer is false.

- the notion that ‘workshopping’ can make you a gooder writer is false.

- the notion that feelings (suffering, love, happiness, grief, the ‘heart’) is the birthplace of gooder writing is false.

- the notion that the telling of a good story comprises gooder writing is false.

- the notion that mastery of language produces gooder writing is false.

if you believe that any of these notions have actually helped you to become a gooder writer, i assure you the connection (perceived) is coincidental. in short, everything you have thus far believed as it relates to gooder writing is false. once you have purged your quill of these dumbass beliefs you will be ready to work on your bow.

ii. observation is what goes in, it’s something else entirely that comes out
were you a gooder writer this would be perfectly clear to you. but since you are not i shall make it crystal clear.

what one observes should not also be what one relates. a blue bird, for example, once recorded by the brain, should not then be preserved by that brain for the purpose of recitation. the recordation of the blue bird should serve as a template that will become sublimated, transformed, coalesced (with x), enhanced. i shall call this the ‘alchemization’ of the blue bird. this, like observation, is an involuntary reflex of the limited human brain that requires little of its already teenie-weenie functional capacities.

should someone observe a blue bird only to recite ‘blue bird’ or ‘flying blue thing with some other sharp pointy thing on its head’ we can say that what that someone is reciting is the original recordation of the blue bird which served as the brain’s template. this is non-fiction/journalism crap and does not comprise gooder writing. the alchemization of the blue bird, although complete, is inaccessible to this someone (you).

iii. the two necessary events following alchemization that bring about the effect known as gooder writing
although the involuntary alchemization of what one observes provides the stuff of gooder writing, the ability to access this stuff without de-alchemizing it or un-transforming it is what separates gooder ‘writers’ from less gooder ‘writers’. it is therefore necessary that two events occur following alchemization:

1. the destruction of the original recordation that served as the template from which the alchemization occurred.
the destruction of the original template launches the mind into a realm known as ‘imagination’. the destruction of this template can also be called ‘letting go’. i’ll note for you, although it should be obvious, that the ‘letting go’ does not occur prior to the alchemization, nor is the ‘letting go’ necessary for the alchemization to occur. the letting go or destruction of the original template facilitates the accessing of the alchemization from the area the alchemization occurred (the imagination). should the original template not be completely destroyed, the effects produced would be similar to dada or beat as the mind is still hanging by one arm, so to speak, from the partially undestroyed original template. the mind, in turn, wanting to let go but not having the courage to completely let go produces writing based on this awareness, which resembles something that may have been the effect of this ‘letting go’ but in reality is an effect produced by wanting to let go, being afraid to let go, not wanting anyone to know you are afraid to let go, and finally not being able to let go. this is not gooder writing. what what? no, what more, ‘letting go’ artificially by some external means is also evidence of the lack of courage necessary to let go. this also depreciates the original template, for even though the original template must eventually be destroyed, seeing it as it is is vital to its alchemization. this type of artificial letting go also produces royal crapola.

the destruction (‘letting go’) of the original recordation that served as the template from which the alchemization occurred is the most difficult and important part of gooder writing. should one not destroy the original recordation or ‘let go’, the ability to access the alchemized blue bird in the ‘imagination’ is impossible. it may seem like a simple thing to do but i assure you (yet again (peasants)) that less than 1% of 1% of the entire human population, present and past, has ever had the ability to ‘let go’ for the purpose of producing gooder writing.

2. the accessing of the alchemization of the original recordation.
once one has ‘let go’, the ability to access the alchemization of the original recordation is academic. it is not a matter of how this accessing occurs, just as it is not a matter of how one gets wet in the ocean. it simply occurs.

in conclusion re: the introduction
it is my hope that with this basic introduction to gooder writing that most of you will see the futility of attempting it and give up completely. if, however, you wish to ‘hope against all hope’, a more nuanced elaboration of this interdiction shall follow. though i doubt any of you dumbasses will get it.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sean Brijbasi can get away with writing the way he does because he has nothing to say. He’s said nothing in three books: One Note Symphonies, Still Life in Motion, and The Unknowed Things. He’s about to say nothing in a fourth: A Dictionary of Coincidences. Go see nothing at sean’s website.

Illustration source: Devis with Babies

© 2010 – 2011, Sean Brijbasi. All rights reserved.