A Writer's Work is Never Done
Once upon a time you could write a book on the typewriter in your attic, bundle the pages together with some butcher paper and twine and schlep it to New York to give to your publisher and then forget about the whole thing until it was time to blow the dust off the keys for the next go round. Or so we imagine it. Then came the critics. And then the book tours. Then Amazon.com and the damned reader reviews. Then the blogs. Now you gotta respond to all that shit. Any critique that goes unanswered, regardless of how obscure the publication or how ridiculous the charge, is out there for the world to see. A criticism of an author's work, floating around out there on the internets somewhere, is indistinguishable from a hard fact until the power of Google puts it in front of the author himself and he responds.
Ask Sherman Alexie. We were reading the Elegant Variation blog yesterday and we came across a post entitled "Writers Behaving Badly" that details the story of some newspaper reviewer from the Rocky Mountain Times who disparaged Alexie's most recent book because it went direct to paperback. Sherman called her out by name in an interview:
Part of it is that I’m responding to a review in the Rocky Mountain News by Jenny Shank. She thought Black Cat (Flight’s publisher) hated the book, and publishing a paperback original was like a studio not allowing a movie to be reviewed before its release. It was shocking to me that someone with very little experience in publishing like Jenny Shank would even have a guess at that. The arrogance was astonishing.
So, maybe Sherman Alexie can respond to this: I haven't read his latest book, but I'm sure that the Ridnour piece he wrote for the Stranger is the best work he's done in years. At least it's the only work of his I've read in that time. Too bad it went direct to alt-weekly--his publisher obviously didn't think much of it.
C'mon, Google, do your dirty work.
