Perception of a writer:

Exploring writers’ intricate world

By Ranga CHANDRARATHNE

A word is not the same with one writer as with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket. ~Charles Peguy

In a comprehensive interview with Montage, American writer Pablo D’Stair spells out how the world of literature interacts with his own personal life. Pablo’s saga of becoming a writer and publisher began with his intense passion for writing. At the initial stages of his career, Pablo had written, at least, ten times what he wrote so far. It was a constant struggle against odds. However, unlike some of today’s writers, in writing Pablo had absolutely no idea of a so called target readership or an audience as he says. For him, audience is incidental. “audience” to me (though I use the term often to mean “readership”, I admit) is wholly abstract—there is Audience, people who can be witness, who can partake of a work in whichever way, but I am always dubious of folks who term some certain slice of the whole of it “theirs”—“My audience” as in the-type-of-people-I-am-“aiming at” (whatever that could mean) their “intended audience”—in terms of literature this a nonsense and bores me terribly.

" Audience, purely—the abstract, individual-less truth of it—is comprised, automatically, every single reaction and opinion that could possibly be had, doesn’t matter a jot if I encounter any or all of it, personally.

" Readership—to get back to my thrust here—is a term I like more, because it seems to indicate individuals who have come to my work and actively read it, nothing to do with me, nothing to do with solicitation or desire—they are, simply matter of fact, the ones who read it, nothing to do with me and they didn’t exert and will continue not to exert influence on the writing, itself.”.

What Pablo attempts to drive home is that readers are those who enjoy the books or writings and who would not in any manner exert influence on the writer.

However, readers are greatly influenced by readings. The writer’s role is important in that they create perceptions in the minds of readers. In essence, they represent not only themselves and their ideas but also the milieu, kind of society they live in and its mores.

Referring to the perception built in around the publishing industry, Pablo observes the term ‘publication’ has led ‘built-in, unconsciously accepted hierarchies that are so remote from art and literature sometimes I think using the word at all is silly. More than silly, though, it’s probably just irrelevant. "

Q: How do you define yourself as a writer and the readership you have developed in US?

A: Well, before I had a readership, or what one would call my readership (intimate and hodge-podge a thing as it is, it’s odd to call it anything) I wrote at least ten times what I’ve written since. By which I don’t mean that I doodled around or “drafted” (or whatever it so many writers unfortunately call what it is they do before they have a “readership”) didn’t “have ideas for things I’d one day write” I just wrote—novels, theatre, poetry, finished seventy-five percent of them, the others got usually to the halfway mark and I’d just lose interest (or else retain interest but some new idea would Darwin them out). There is (to give point to that preamble) no necessary connection in my mind between Being-a-Writer and Having-a-Readership—the latter is incidental and for me is an intimate, but casual pursuit, having a readership is something I only pursue, of late, because I’ve found a way to frame it, to give it personal shape and purpose. It honestly baffles me, the specific desire in other writers (either abstractly or in those I know personally) to have a readership as part of what they consider writing, or what they consider Being Writers, anyway.

To answer part of the question prompt in direct terms (though still slightly side-step it) I would say I define myself as a writer and my readership as distinctly separate, touching only incidentally. I do prefer the term Readership, as you put it, to Audience, because “audience” to me (though I use the term often to mean “readership”, I admit) is wholly abstract—there is Audience, people who can be witness, who can partake of a work in whichever way, but I am always dubious of folks who term some certain slice of the whole of it “theirs”—“My audience” as in the-type-of-people-I-am-“aiming at” (whatever that could mean) their “intended audience”—in terms of literature this a nonsense and bores me terribly.

Audience, purely—the abstract, individual-less truth of it—is comprised, automatically, of every single reaction and opinion that could possibly be had, doesn’t matter a jot if I encounter any or all of it, personally.

Readership—to get back to my thrust here—is a term I like more, because it seems to indicate individuals who have come to my work and actively read it, nothing to do with me, nothing to do with solicitation or desire—they are, simply matter of fact, the ones who read it, nothing to do with me and they didn’t exert and will continue not to exert influence on the writing, itself.

Conflict of interests

Q: As a publisher how do you see yourself in relation to being a writer? Can there be a conflict of interests?

A: There can’t in my specific case, no—but I’m a publisher in a very fluid and separate way than I’m a writer. Being-a-Writer and Being-a-Publisher are another two things that have nothing to do with each other but incidentally overlap, when looked at in a certain sense.

I publish as an appreciation of the simplicity and beauty of being able to, in my circumstances. It developed over a period of time to what it is now, refined, took odd routes, but basically I put out the work of other people because it can very easily be done and I cannot understand why they aren’t doing it themselves—it irks me that (especially in this day and age) even writers who don’t actively partake in any traditional system still see, even philosophically, the act of writing and the act of publishing joined, they simply aren’t, not of necessity.

Nothing commercial in how I am a Publisher—though certainly this isn’t any stance against a commerciality, large or small scale, I don’t care about any of that.

Also, I like to put out other people’s work to see what they do once their work is out, “experiments of observation” as it were—I do everything I can think of to give them everything I would value, everything I would want out of a (small scale) publisher, everything I personally would find advantageous and then watch where it goes.

I don’t know—publishing someone else’s work isn’t any different than publishing mine, to me—there’s no need for “publication” in any traditional, “commonly understood” sense (really I don’t think there ever has been) it’s a term that’s come to mean so many different things it’s kind of a laugh but, sadly, this very fact has also lead to built-in, unconsciously accepted hierarchies that are so remote from art and literature sometimes I think using the word at all is silly. More than silly, though, it’s probably just irrelevant.

So, as to conflict of interests, no no—because for me, I’m going to be writing what I write and doing what I do, no matter what, it’s never happened that I’m in a position to have to choose “my stuff or the stuff of the authors I put out” never happens. And no conflict of interest…because, to use an odd phrase…there are no interests. There is no intention, no desired outcome, no…strategy. It’s the same as writing a novel, myself, publishing one—Why did I do it? I don’t know. Any writer who asks themselves that question (or has an answer) and any publisher who asks that question is a bizarre spectacle to me.

New audience

Q: How do you feel about having reached a new audience through your contributions to Montage? As a US writer and publisher what are your observations about Montage as a literary supplement?

A: The Montage is something of an ideal to me, it was so strange when the opportunity first presented itself to me. I feel very at home in the cross-cultural set up, because most of my literary headspace feels distinctly outside of the scene directly around me, to begin with. The literature that has meant the most to me is stuff that came across in translation and often was separated not just linguistically, but by at least one hundred years (well, some of it) and there has always been a kind of void in me in that I am aware that I couldn’t possibly produce in a US reader the same, unnamable reaction I had to the most fundamentally important work to me because we would share too much context, too much unconscious context.

I know, for example, that when I read Hamusn or Camus or Saramago or…Celine, Jelinek, Chesterton, whoever…that the writing did not originate in an “American headspace”, that there is something in the foreignness (based only on the fact I am from where and when I am and those writers are from where and when they are (or were) that is irreplaceable, that pushes the literature a step further into my having distinctly unconscious and un-self-conscious response to it (moreso than even dated American work).

That was always very, centrally important to me, the knowledge of gulf, the awareness of elsewhere—so knowing that, for example, my short story collection Seven Stories about Working in a Bookstore was being read by exponentially more people in Sri Lanka than ever read it in the US was, in many ways, my first encounter with having my writing be where I always felt it should be.

I love knowing that Sri Lankan readers—obviously as intelligent as me, obviously as keen as me, obviously as in the here-and-now as me—were reading me through a filter of lacking context—that’s pure, that’s something that will happen to all literature, eventually, and a perspective of readership that should be embraced.

I think my work is being read “better” and more purely in the pages of the Montage (which I don’t mean as a slight to the US, just a fact). Even if a Sri Lankan reader approaches my fiction or essays with some intellectual agenda, the natural distance between that agenda and the origination of the work leads to something invaluable—even if the reader’s slant is prejudiced, somehow the voicing of that slant is non-prejudicial.

As a piece, itself, as a literary supplement I think (this isn’t sucking up) the Montage and the way it’s put together is something of an understated knockout. It’s just…there. It covers such a breadth, in such even, agenda-less a manner (as far as I know) that it oftentimes comes to me as relief after having spent a few days navigating what can be a mine-field of US journals and zines, and collectives.

I just don’t find the Montage to be up to anything except being a forum for sincere exploration and expression, while (not always negatively, but always to some extent) I find things in the States to have under-tastes, aims (and aims that often seem untethered, out in the ether somewhere, more to do with generalized opinion, the Scene itself, than literature and content and dialogue).

Outlook

Q: You have submitted several articles offering insights into your outlook as a literary philosopher. How many in the US share your outlooks concerning literature and literary expressionism?

A: Really I don’t know if I can think of a single one. Or better to say, piecemeal I can think of some people, here and there, who in conversation with me will nod at things I say or even be very enthusiastic, but I can’t say that (in my small circle) I’ve come across anyone who shares my outlooks or philosophies. That being said, I’m sure there are some—I don’t spend any time thinking about it or looking for them.

I’ve run across a fair number of people who fervently have the opposite outlooks and philosophies than me, but in a very tame way.

I don’t know—and this said as politely as I can term it and I don’t mean offense with it, though I’m getting antsy it will be misconstrued—that I’ve come across many people with actual outlooks or philosophies, at all, certainly none they seem to care to articulate or even casually discuss.

There’s a kind of artificiality in attitude in a lot of writer’s I’ve paid attention to or come across, a posturing that makes what they are doing not match up to (and it seems purposefully) with what they are saying .

To take the edge off that statement a bit (maybe) I will further that while I have not come across anyone who seems to have a personal, self-produced, individuated outlook or philosophy, I have come across umpteen people who have bits and pieces of outlooks and philosophies they reiterate or quote or pay lip service to or mention, a lot of folks who are (or claim to be) devotees of statements and outlooks originated by other, often more established or “known” writers.

Of course, I couldn’t (and wouldn’t want to) write a bloody treatise on Literary Philosophy and of course I don’t mean to claim anything scholarly about myself here (I admire scholarship, but have no illusions I have the right blood for it).

You mention my articles, which are personal investigations and yes are distillations of larger philosophies I have, but these are living philosophies, almost obsessively churned and poked at philosophies, mindsets I have that I just like to explore and express, they’re not manifesto or sets of “this is that, intrinsically” reasoning—I don’t care for all that.

Ugly timidity

In the US (the bit of the US I know of) there is an ugly timidity disguising itself as humility or nonchalance—or worse, there’s a kind of mongrel headspace, a completely skittish sense-of-self or thought or pertinence.

I can think of so many writers (some I know personally, some I only know of) who will, on the one hand, be quick to take up the position that Artists (and Art, itself, the idea of calling what they do Art) is some bloated, hoity-toity attitude, something to be derided with regard to themselves and what they do (the humble, aw shucks stance) but on the other hand, when it comes to talking about artists they admire, they admit to and gush about some intrinsic sublimity, some meaning—if someone they admire called themselves Artist, these writers would not say “Oh, what a hoity asshole” or whatever, “What a dolt and a person who should be dismissed out of hand for such attitudes) they would instead eagerly say “Yeah, X writer is an artist, I could never be that” now positing Being-an-Artist as something to be revered and elevated.

And, really depressingly to me, it’s nine-out-of-ten times artists who have achieved name recognition and commercial status that are defended as Artists—it’s arrogant for someone to consider themselves an artist until they have a long term book-deal or a film adaptation has come out, then it’s alright, then it’s fine. There’s a sloppy mish-mash of deifying things established while less-than-humanizing things not (including themselves).

I don’t understand it, at all, it’s something very upsetting to me. It’s called “vanity” publishing when an unknown individual produces a handful of copies of their title—this is ridiculed, dismissed as arrogant—but it is considered “humble” (to judge by people’s reactions) to shoot off one’s mouth about whatever as long as you’ve got a book deal or the film rights have been purchased (the bloody holy grail in the US)—the value, meaning, identity of something cannot be argued if it’s shown it has commercial viability (and if it’s shown it doesn’t, it has no legs to stand on).

Worse, those who don’t even consider or care to “try to get traditionally published” (please note I do not consider myself in this boat, I more than consider it and think of it fondly, often) those who don’t even dismiss that route, just never consider it, well…they’re basically considered nonentities. I’ve never come across someone just championing a piece of unpublished writing, just talking about an unpublished piece of writing as of worth, as literature, talking about it the same as something published—best case scenario (and it’s good, I’m not against it) is that they will try to get it published, wish it success.

But, words written in a notebook are not considered literature (generally) to the US scene as I know it—nothing is until it’s in some saleable format, and (largely) not until a third party makes it that way and moves enough units. Art is “attempted art” until (even in a niche way) it gets enough backers.

Q: In the course of developing your publishing career how did you develop your pool of authors? What were the guidelines/criteria for you to select manuscripts for publication under your label?

A: I didn’t come at writing through any schooling or university program, was always just a writer with a vague idea that some writers have books produced for whatever reason, so I came to publishing other people personally and organically. At first, it was an active matter of poking around various online communities, looking for things that I liked and making offers to put together a volume. With the first set of things I published (other than my own stuff) I postured that I was a bit more experienced than I was, because my method of Learning is Doing and I find that if I am acting on behalf of someone else’s work I put a lot more pressure on myself. With my own, early self-publishing tryouts I’d not be so concerned with the outcome and could easily let myself get distracted, but when I had someone else’s novel or collection in my hands, well, I needed to do good by them—it helped me to publish other people, honestly I think every writer should buddy up with another writer, the production and promotion of work should be swapped “You get mine out there-I get yours out there”.

The first writers I dealt with were outliers, like me, part of no community and largely unaware of The Scene or The Small Press, as an actuality. Over time, people would submit stuff to my press and I got myself a little bit more involved with some authors, started feeling my way around the world I was slowly having revealed to me. To get a bit more immediate and voluminous exposure, I’d do literary journals concerned with publishing serialized collections, novellas, stand alone short stories, that was an important step and taught me some happy and some sad realities of the Scene (happy: there are some drop dead brilliant writers out there; sad: people published in the same journal or anthology seldom read the other material they are in with).

Really, odd as it might be to say, publishing just kind of happened, like one day I said “Well, I’m going to do this” and next thing I knew I was actively involved—refining every step of the way, constantly thinking up new projects.

I was and am very, very free as far as guidelines etc.—core to my philosophy of publishing (in keeping with my philosophy of writing) was (and is) that I want the individual artists’ visions to be first and foremost. While initially I did dabble at editorial input, by the second set of material I published I knew that wasn’t for me and that people who it was for were people I wasn’t interested in associating with (not out of negative feeling, just out of being so polarized in fundamental outlook).

I wanted something more raw, I didn’t want what I did to be just “my attempt at being like another publisher” but a realization of my philosophies and personal aesthetics, however it turned out.

Overall, in order to publish something I had to personally dig the work, but from the beginning and more and more as time went on I made sure I didn’t pigeonhole the press to my rather crystalized personal tastes as a reader (I don’t read much)—I didn’t look for types-of-things in particular, made it a point if I thought I’d not dig on a submission to set all prejudice aside and think to myself “Is it earnest, is it something, is it honestly an unconscious, artistic rendering?”. For example, I remember a particular submission came with a synopsis/query (I despise such things) and I read the synopsis and thought it sounded godawful, total waste of time, then just in some idle moment a month later decided to peek at the manuscript and it was great stuff (not at all the sort of thing I personally would ever read, but it was good stuff so I published it).

If there was something, even if I read through a manuscript out of sequence, if just one thing caught me, a great paragraph or the energy from some random section, that’d be enough—I’ve published things that I (not naming names) as a whole was not in love with due to my own preferences in narrative etc. but that had a particular section I just thought was phenomenal, set my overall prejudice to the side and am thrilled, now, that I put the pieces out—I know I don’t like all the true Art of the world, but I do find it all vital and necessary, it’d be a mistake to only put out stuff I personally, at that time and place, love, it wouldn’t be good for literature, it wouldn’t be good for me.

To be continued