The Manly Art of Knitting

Literary Lunch with Susan, Jamie, Heather

The only book we looked at during lunch was the chapbook sized pamphlet The Manly Art of Knitting, but because we had four writers in our company, it was (in retrospect) a meeting of the Screen Porch Literary Guild. Heather Finch was the guest of honor because she drove the farthest; you might know her from the People’s Food Co-op or from Water Street Coffee Joint. Currently Heather is living in Sturgis with her ma, who will not let her have a goat. We all advised her about creating a blog called Living in Sturgis, or something like that. Award-winning poet Susan Ramsey came by with Swedish Spritz cookies—she did not bring the camel shaped cookies, but only the round ones. She was knitting a scarf even as she ate, talked and read from the Manly Art of Knitting. She suggested that Heather Finch apply to the Notre Dame MFA creative writing program. Jamie Blake, aspiring young adult author brought three loaves of French bread to assure we had the anti-Atkins lunch. She admired Heather Finch’s sweater, which had two owls on it, one that said “whoooo” and the other said “whom.” Christopher was with us, of course, and Mike Campbell happened to show up. We ate French Onion Soup and some turkey tetrazini and bread and butter and then cookies and candy for dessert, and we drank coffee. Heather told us about her bad ex-boyfriend and said we should kick him if we see him and we will.


The cool grainy photo of Susan is from her MFA graduation party; the other one is ofJamie Blake and me.

Kalamazoo Art Hop

The first Friday of every month, downtown Kalamazoo has an Art Hop at which folks can view art and eat snacks and join in the fun of being downtown. The most popular Art Hop of the year is the December event, because folks like to buy Christmas gifts, and in December, the Kalamazoo Public Library invites writers to hang out at tables and try to sell signed copies of their books. In truth, few books move, and I was thinking I'd skip it, until I remembered that I should start marketing American Salvage. Though it is six months from publication, I should be alerting folks, just in case it might make a difference. So I told Marti Fritz at the library that so long as I get to sit by Andy Mozina and Elizabeth Kerlikowske, I would be there, December 5, 6 pm to 9 pm. So now I just have to figure out how to get busy Christmas shoppers excited about a book that won't exist for another six months. Any thoughts? Apparently, Elizabeth K. has organized up a kind of poetry reading also, that will be going on the Children's Room.

For more info about the library Art Hop event, go to this link: http://www.kpl.gov/holiday-hop.aspx

If you want more information about the December Art Hop in general, or a complete schedule of fun and free snacks, you can get it through this link: http://www.kazooart.org/calendar/index.asp?id=20166

As self-promotion, I should mention that Kenyon Review (a few months back) conducted an interview with me, in which they talked about American Salvage and you can read that interview here. http://www.kenyonreview.org/interviews/campbell.php

Oh, and speaking of submitting work to magazines, I got this email the today, from Ploughshares, with the subject line "Your submission to Ploughshares." The email contained this message:

2008-12-01 17:43:39 (GMT -5:00)

This is especially interesting since I have nothing submitted to Ploughshares at this time.

This photo above is my niece Kellee on Halloween dressed as a ZOMBIE GARDENER.

First Page Proofs

Norma VanRheenen read the page proofs for American Salvage and she found a couple of actual errors that I had not found in my reading--it's amazing how those errors hide from the author. So I read the page proofs as well and made more changes than I really ought to have made, maybe a hundred changes in word choice and other minor details. I changed the title of one of the stories from "The Solution to Ben's Problem" to "The Solution to Brian's Problem," because really there aren't people named Ben around here. According to my managing editor Kristin Harpster Lawrence, authors don't normally get copies of the second page proofs, but I asked her if she would send them to me so that maybe I could get Carla to read those, since she should be rested up from reading Rhoda Janzen's book. One gets so few books published in a lifetime that one hates to have an error in any of them.

This photo was taken at Steve and Shawn Wagner's House (Shawn Wagner is someone who appears in the acknowledgments page), and we had just been trap shooting. There were lots of mushrooms in their yard, and they were talking about eating some of them. But look what happened to Alice, I said.

Page Proofs

The page proofs have arrived for my collection, and I was given two weeks to proofread them. And now I have wasted five of those days grading papers and cleaning my office (I always have to clean my office before critical stages in the publishing process). Wayne State paid good money to copyedit my book, but they don't hire proofreaders, so I need to make sure I catch all mistakes at this stage. After several beers last month, Carla Vissers had agreed to proofread the book for me, but when I contacted her a few days ago, saying I had to have my book proofread by November 11, she told me too goll darned bad, that she was proofreading Rhoda Janzen's book, also due back to the publisher November 11. So, it's not enough that Rhoda is taller than me and slimmer, or that she has a PhD after her name or got a six figure advance, but now she has co-opted my proofreader. Why, if Rhoda weren't fabulous, I might think a bad thought about her. By coincidence, Rhoda and I have the same size feet, size twelve, which means Carla can't use that as an excuse for rejecting me and choosing Rhoda. This is a photograph of Carla.

Update: Norma VanRheenen has agreed to proofread my book. Whew! That was a close one.

American Salvage Cover

Wayne State University Press just sent me the cover art for my book, and I am thrilled with how it came out. It's sexy and smart and mysterious. I have a good number of writer friends who have been unhappy with the covers of their book, and so I do feel fortunate. This is a book I can enjoy looking at and enjoy selling. The photograph is by Mary Whalen, and the gal in the photo is Frances, her daughter. The guy is Mary's nephew, and the car is a Charger, like the one in Dukes of Hazard TV show. The book feels much more real now that we have a cover, and I look forward to seeing it next year. I'll let you all know about the book release parties---one in Detroit and one in Kalamazoo. Meanwhile I'll keep you posted about the ins and outs of the rest of the publication/promotion process on this blog. Cheers! BJC

All Stories Published

I can now say that all the stories in my forthcoming collection American Salvage are published or scheduled for publication in literary magazines. Here's the list as it appears on the back page of my book

Gratefully acknowledged are the magazines in which these stories originally appeared: “The Trespasser” appeared in Witness; “The Yard Man,” “The Inventor, 1972,” and “Fuel for the Millennium” appeared in The Southern Review; “World of Gas” appeared in The Heartlands Today; “The Solutions to Ben’s Problem” appeared in Diagram; “Family Reunion” appeared in Mid-American Review; and was originally read aloud and broadcast on a WBEZ Program, Stories on Stage; “Winter Life” and “Falling” appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review; "Bringing Belle Home" appeared in ACM; "King Cole's American Salvage" appeared in Pleiades; "The Burn" appeared in Controlled Burn; “Storm Warning” appeared in Orchid: A Literary Review; “Boar Taint” appeared in The Kenyon Review.

In my last collection, one of the very best stories "The Perfect Lawn" was rejected by pretty much every magazine on the planet, and so this time it's nice to have all of my darlings placed somewhere.

There was a little awkward moment a week ago, when I had two unpublished stories left, and I was sending them to several places. When Carol Finke at Controlled Burn accepted "King Cole's American Salvage," I sent a note to Pleiades withdrawing it, but then two days later (before my letter arrived) I got a call from Phong Nguyen at Pleiades accepting it. Yow! So I sent "The Burn" to Controlled Burn and asked if I could switch with them, give them "The Burn," and the editor sent me a note back saying, yeah, we like "The Burn" better anyway. So, all the stories are nestled snugly into pages. Good night.

p.s. Chris took this photo of a bee's face with his new macro lens on his digital camera.