Why I’ve decided to blog my reviews…July 13th, 2006
I wearied long ago of submitting to magazines and waiting for months on editors who couldn’t understand where I was coming from and whose views I didn’t share, finding their underlying vision of life stultifying, out of harmony with my own experience, so much so that it was obviously futile to continue to seek a hearing in their pages. The problem was theirs, not mine. I have a decade and a half of rejection letters to prove it, from every New York and university publisher and many “prestigious” editors, benefactors of nepotism and otherwise, dullards, really, it always seemed to me, often corrupt, parasitic corporations, destroying the culture, with decadent and demeaning visions of life.
So for more than fifteen years, nearly every magazine and journal of the time, and publishers, had shown themselves only capable of rejecting my writing, while rarely demonstrating even a trace of understanding of what I was actually doing, in my own terms. There are times in literary and cultural history when the best thing a writer can do is return to, or stay put, in one’s home, stay in Concord, Copenhagen, The Hague, or Derry, New Hampshire, as good as anywhere else, the gods having planted you there, apparently for a reason, try to learn and understand their lessons.
My MCRI blog in 2006 was my introduction to the blog, and so I explored it for things that really interested me, in various incarnations, eReading and Reviews, bringing my disparate parts together now, in the summer of 2011, for the first time, on The Globe, a healing of sorts, or gathering, perhaps a resolution and perspective time can sometimes provide.
Following William Blake, Walt Whitman, and other writers, I followed the traditional route of turning to one’s own devices, “under one’s own steam,” as Robert Hayden once phrased it to me, going around the prevailing mentality, evolving with the times, from conventional printing, to worldwide POD through Ingram’s Lightning Source, for both hard and soft cover books, then Jason Epstein’s Espresso Book Machine, and finally ebooks, the last of which I believe resolves all of the problems confronting writers and readers for reasons I explain elsewhere:
The Mission of Earthrise Press
Publishing in the Post-Gutenberg Age
“…bringing my disparate parts together now, in the summer of 2011, for the first time, on The Globe, a healing of sorts, or gathering, perhaps a resolution and perspective time can sometimes provide.”
I’m glad you did. I like your reviews. Many of your thoughts on spirituality, race, academia are close to my own.
I have a degree in Spanish and Latin American area studies from the University of Washington. While I spent a few exciting years in Central America life swerved and I ended up with a scholarship to Keio University in Japan (your biography tells me that you can understand life’s swerves). I’ve been in teaching, business and social work but a constant has been a love of literature worldwide. I look forward to reading more of your work.
Best regards,