Reinventing the Life of a Poet in the Modern World
I just created a reading group guide for my new book, "Why Photographers Commit Suicide."
Each question has two parts:
1. Questions about what can be found in the book and how the poems work
2. Questions about how the reader might feel about the topics covered in the book.
This was sincerely exciting for me and I am now no longer a book-review virgin.
Read the full review by Devin McGuire, Assistant Editor of the Aurorean.
Highlights:
“Why Photographers Commit Suicide” is a book of poetry for our times…McCray takes a humanistic approach and deftly plays upon themes of fear, loneliness, and loss, things the early American settlers faced in large proportion as well…
I think what is so special about this book is that not only does it entertain the imagination with futuristic vision but also for every time it takes us and leads us to the existential abyss, prickling our fears and anxieties, it also takes that idea, mirrors, and thrusts it against all the celestial objects of the universe. Here we have stars and planets personified, acting out the baser human emotions and acts of sex-lust, lost loves, and betrayals, dealing with their own fears and anxieties about loss and the ultimate end, a sort of cosmic soap opera that mimics the natural flux and flow of the universe.The effect is strange and familiar at the same time. We relate to all of this cosmic collision. McCray just offers us a different kind of telescope to view these things. Her language is rich and daringly playful, and her sense of poetic rhythm is excellent. A good poem shows its weight in worth when read aloud. These poems sound great aloud. If a poet can strike upon the heart, the mind, and the ear all at the same time, something which Mary McCray has done here, then the poet is getting the job done."
Honestly, I was feeling kind of down the day Tom Crawford offered me my first book blurb. Wow, like Dinah Washington says in the song, what a difference a praise makes.
"What a surprise! Poetry that rightly deserves the
praise, by which I mean poetry that makes you forget you're reading poetry. How
refreshing. For far too many American poets, their poems are a glitter of
self-consciousness–the facile of the MFA crowd. This new collection by Mary
McCray should earn her a wide readership with its outer space leaps of
invention. Her ribald sense of humor. Grit. Originality. "
–Tom Crawford, Author of The Names of Birds, Wu Wei, and The Temple on Monday
Many thanks to all my friends and family who went out and purchased a copy of Why Photographers Commit Suicide. I really appreciate it.
Enough copies sold in the first four days to get the book listed on the following Amazon Hot New Release Lists for a period of time:
Astronomy New Releases (1)
Science & Math: Astonomy & Space Science: Kindle Edition: Last 30 Days (6)
Astrophysics & Space Science (3)
Astronomy & Space Science (8, over Astronomy For Dummies)
Poetry (14 Kindle, 16 Paperback, on the same list with Mary Oliver's new release, Ric Ocasek–forreal, and the latest edition of Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky)
Physics (9)
Of course these numbers are based on sales rank, which change by the hour. Friday afternoon my rank was in the high 20 thousands and low 30s (pretty sweet). By Sunday, as the first marketing push waned, I was up in the high 90s.
"Don't obsess about rank," the marketers say. Just keep getting the word our there. Okay…but it's pretty facinating to watch sales. And seeing my book up on those lists was sorta SWEET!
Why Photographers Commit Suicide is out today on Amazon and in eBooks from Amazon and Smashwords.
The book explores, in small narratives and lyrical poems, the American idea of
Manifest Destiny, particularly as it relates to the next frontier—space
exploration. We examine the scientific, psychological and
spiritual frontiers enmeshed in our very human longing for space,
including our dream of a space station on Mars. These poems survey what
we gain and what we lose as we progress towards tomorrow, and how we can
begin to understand the universal melancholy we seem to cherish for
what we leave behind, the lives we have already lived. We unearth
our feelings about what it means to move ahead and stake out new
territory, and what it means to be home.
What an amazing experience this has been. If you've been following this blog over the last few months, you've been reading about the trials and the amazing learning experience that was putting together a book of poems.
I love so much about how this book turned out: the press logo (thank you Jeff), the artwork (thank you Emi!), the introduction (thank you Howard!).
I'm so appreciative of all the help I received from other poets, artists and the universe itself, which has poked me ever so gently down this path.
Why Photographers Commit Suicide
by Mary McCray (2012)
Trementina Books
ISBN 0985984503
87 pages/8 illustrations by Emi Villavicencio
9×6/paperback and eBook
Paperback $13.00 Buy
Kindle $2.99 Buy
Other eBook formats $2.99 Buy
I hear a lot of older writers pooh-poohing ebooks. Poets seem to especially hate ebooks because poets tend to be nostalgic for a time before e-anything.
And I can relate. I dreaded the impending popularity of ebooks for many, many years. For one thing, I love books. I love them as physical objects. I love the way they smell. I love they way they sound when you bend back the cover. I love the character wrinkles the creases make on the spine. I love the worn look of book that has been read over and over. I love to see books stacked in every room of my house. I love leaving a book on my chair and knowing no one would ever dream of stealing it, even if it was a Harry Potter book. You can't take a Kindle or a Nook or an iPad to the beach. Well, you could but it wouldn't be very convenient if sand short-circuited your book or if someone stole your entire library!
Secondly, I'm from the book generation (1500-2007) and not the device generation (kids today). And so are my parents. They are not going to be impressed by an ebook, just as they weren't impressed by my websites or my blogs. eThings are for crazy people. My parents will not reconsider their enduring idea that I've wasted my life with this poetry stuff unless I produce something on paper.
Well, tough titties for me because ebooks are here and they're still here and get used to it. Kids today love the e-formats and ebooks are rewriting publishing history. And if we're at all adult about this situation we have to admit: we're writing for the future and not for the past. That's the cold hard fact of the matter.Poets won't start winning the culture wars with their fuddy-duddy ebook hatin'.
I felt my pain about this for many years and finally let it go and learned how to format an ebook.
Problem is–poetry is incredibly difficult to format to show correctly on all variations of ebooks. Some insist it can't be done. Just ask Billy Collins. But thankfully, html hackers have uncovered some work-arounds that helped me and my ebook struggles over the past few weeks. After years of working as a consultant on ICANN's website, I was able to use my knowledge of html to format the poems for ePub, mobi, PDF and many other formats downloaded from Smashwords and Amazon. This wasn't without drama, however. Many of my poems have indents of various sizes. The book has graphics. One particular interior graphic continues to give me and my designer a hard time. We may have to sacrifice it for Kindle edition. My draft Kindle looks great if you download it from Amazon but not if you download it from Smashwords.
But other publishers had done it so I can do it. In fact, one of the published faculty at IAIA told me last week that his book on Copper Canyon was available on ebook and so it is: Preliminary Report by Jon Davis.
I don't for a minute believe that physical books are going to disappear. But if you want to publish in the 21st century, you must make peace with ebooks. I have to admit, on the iPad poems look quite lovely.
So now it feels like we're getting somewhere. The cover has been finalized! Whoo-hoo. Now goes the cycles of fixing the innards.
There are some benefits to having a parental publisher. We talked about this somewhat when we talked about the pros and cons in our first post about self-publishing. The publishing business is changing and DIYers are now poised to take advantage of that in a forceful way. But it is a lot of work. And if you don't put in the work, it shows.
There's a local publisher in my hometown who I met with once. They sent me a letter full of typos and I went in to talk to them. They do two kinds of publishing: what I call "parental publishing" (traditional publishing) and they are also what Mark Levine calls a subsidy publisher (you pay them to step you through POD publishing). What you get with them is basically an imprint logo to live behind…but little else. You do get copious amounts of layout calamities and typos (at least in all six books of theirs I've seen). And it was this experience meeting with them (along with a year-long market study and my own track record with DIY) that inspired me to go ahead and do-it-myself. Even though this meant I was the one filing for my own copyright. I was the one correcting round after round of proofs and solving layout problems.
In the home stretch, this included deciding how my titles would lay above my poems, where the page numbers would display, suppressing page numbers, choosing page alignments, adding back material to the book to ensure a good-looking spine. Otherwise, my book would look more like a chapbook.
I also had to proof my apostrophes and quotation marks to make sure they were displaying right, my hyphens, my paragraph justifications and indents, italicized words, where poems would break from page to page. After every change I had to redo my own Table of Contents and recheck it. I had to make sure names were spelled right and decide if this book was either the poetry of Mary McCray or poems by Mary McCray. I had to make sure our imprint logo looked swell on the cover. I had to nudge the artists to see if the artwork was getting done. I had to shell out some cash to have the book proofread.
I had to start looking at books of poetry on my bookshelf in an entirely new way.
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In the first post about self publishing, we talked about educating yourself about the challenges and advantages of self publishing, creating a marketing plan and gathering up all your book assets, which include logos, permissions, ISBN and LCCN numbers.
The next big project is getting the book into shape. This means copious rounds of self-editing, followed by finding a professional editor/proofreader. You don't have to follow every grammatical rule but you need to be aware of the ones you are intentionally breaking versus the ones you are unintentionally breaking. A professional editor for a book of poetry is very inexpensive. Spending a mere $100 could save you real embarrassment. A good editor will also point out formatting mistakes you may have missed. Typos compromise your credibility. Invest in your credibility.
Last year, my husband encouraged me to connect with artists to illustrate some of my poems. He felt this might jump-start my project. I put an ad out in the Santa Fe Craigslist to find artists interested in my theme. In this way I found two artists I wanted to work with, one who is currently working on inner sketches and my book cover. An artist is invaluable to helping you bring your poems out into the world. And I personally love seeing my poems come to life in someone else's imagination.
As for the interior, CreateSpace (through Amazon.com), provides a template to help you create the innards of your book. Here again, Catherine Ryan Howard and her book Self Printed was indispensable in showing me the way through this process of making all sorts of decisions, from planning out the front and back matter to adding page numbers. I created various samples of font and size styles for poems and their titles and had to make some tough choices when many of my poems stretched to just one lonely line past a book page. Creating a book causes you to rework and give up words, line breaks and, in some cases, entire lines to fit the realities of a physical book.
One of the harsh truths of self publishing is the fact that you do not have all the tools in your arsenal that a professional publisher does, such as rare and expensive fonts that "class up" your words.
Self publishing means you have to start caring about line spacing and character kerning. You start to become intimate with the idea of your book as a physical object.
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