New Story
'Legacies' published by International Literary Quarterly
www.interlitq.org issue 12
Monday, 6 December 2010
Wednesday, 7 July 2010
news
Short Story 'Prelude' published by Untitled Books
http://www.untitledbooks.com/fiction/new-voices/prelude-by-katri-skala/
and forthcoming short story 'Legacies' in issue 12 of the International Literary Quarterly
http://interlitq.wordpress.com/2010/06/28/katri-skala-to-contribute-to-issue-12-of-interlitq
http://www.untitledbooks.com/fiction/new-voices/prelude-by-katri-skala/
and forthcoming short story 'Legacies' in issue 12 of the International Literary Quarterly
http://interlitq.wordpress.com/2010/06/28/katri-skala-to-contribute-to-issue-12-of-interlitq
Wednesday, 3 February 2010
Wednesday, 16 December 2009
Monday, 14 December 2009
Model Rejection
A model rejection from a publisher (I've eliminated the author of this elegant rejection, and, of course, the publisher).
'Thanks so much for sending me the novel, which I’ve much enjoyed reading this week. Your narrator is refreshingly singular and surprising and you chart her emotional terrain with real deftness and authenticity. You also, of course, write beautifully and there was at least one phrase or sentence I paused to admire on every page. After all this, I’m sorry to introduce a ‘but’… but for everything that impressed me about this novel, and everything that I appreciated as a reader, I’m afraid that in the end the slant of the story – with its intense focus upon a protagonist’s interior world – just isn’t quite what I’m looking for for xxx'
'Thanks so much for sending me the novel, which I’ve much enjoyed reading this week. Your narrator is refreshingly singular and surprising and you chart her emotional terrain with real deftness and authenticity. You also, of course, write beautifully and there was at least one phrase or sentence I paused to admire on every page. After all this, I’m sorry to introduce a ‘but’… but for everything that impressed me about this novel, and everything that I appreciated as a reader, I’m afraid that in the end the slant of the story – with its intense focus upon a protagonist’s interior world – just isn’t quite what I’m looking for for xxx'
Wednesday, 9 December 2009
There is much to be argued in the assertions I make in the last post. It could be said, even demonstrated, that literary fiction is healthier now than it ever has been. More books are being written, and more are being read than was ever the case. There is very fine writing being achieved. One could argue that I'm captivated by an idea of a golden age of literary fiction, and that this never existed.
What I feel needs to kept in mind, however, is the forceful influence of the dominant ideology: marketing/PR. And how ideologies work.
If you look at the reasons some of the great modernist writers were rejected by publishers, you'd find a thread running through: a feeling that the work flew in the face of propriety. If one could encapsulate the prevailing mode of thinking among editors then, it would be precisely the societal preoccupation with propriety. Now, of course that's not the case at all. Quite the opposite - see how far you can go to what is quaintly referred to as pushing boundaries, and you'll find an editor jumping on top of the ms. dreaming of bestsellerdom. No, what has now seeped into everything, so much so that editors are barely aware even of how it works on them, is a marketing vapour. And as with all great ideologies, m ost of them are not even aware of how it has affected their capacity to read, to make judgements; of how it mediates their responses to all work.
People collude and create ideologies. They are not simply victims.
Last night's Nightwaves: Nigel Floyd, film critic and Lizzie Francke (UK Film Council) discuss whether it's justifiable, a good thing, that the Film Council has set aside funds for celebrated YBA, now middle-aged and looking for the Next Big Thing, to make films. The disingenuity with which Lizzie Francke, an intelligent, knowledgeable woman, answered Nigel Floyd's assertion that it was all, finally and essentially, about brand, was dispiriting. Of course it's about brand. Marketing. Why not just acknowledge it up front? Unless, she truly believes that what she's up to, what the film council is up to, is encouraging imaginative new approaches to the activity of making films. If she really lacks the critical distance to acknowledge that brand names in the world of the YBA, as in 90s New York with fading celeb artists like Julian Schnabel, drive these initiatives then, - well the ideology has triumphed. The conventional tends to supercede any interesting filmmaking (whatever Nigel Floyd might say about the absence of good 'narrative' - in itself a straightjacketing formula). Those who continue to make interesting films are those who clearly have a long relationship with the medium.
In this era of fragmentation and multimedia, does anyone care? Is it possible to oto make an argument for aesthetic judgement any longer. It requires the foundational basis of knowledge, of comparative and detailed analyses, of an ability to engage in close reading. To be able to think deeply, not simply on the surface. Taste is not a criteria. Opnion doesn't count. Theory is not an argument. Neither is the ability to achieve a finished, accomplished, piece of creative work evidence.
Who can write, nowadays, meaningful criticism?
What I feel needs to kept in mind, however, is the forceful influence of the dominant ideology: marketing/PR. And how ideologies work.
If you look at the reasons some of the great modernist writers were rejected by publishers, you'd find a thread running through: a feeling that the work flew in the face of propriety. If one could encapsulate the prevailing mode of thinking among editors then, it would be precisely the societal preoccupation with propriety. Now, of course that's not the case at all. Quite the opposite - see how far you can go to what is quaintly referred to as pushing boundaries, and you'll find an editor jumping on top of the ms. dreaming of bestsellerdom. No, what has now seeped into everything, so much so that editors are barely aware even of how it works on them, is a marketing vapour. And as with all great ideologies, m ost of them are not even aware of how it has affected their capacity to read, to make judgements; of how it mediates their responses to all work.
People collude and create ideologies. They are not simply victims.
Last night's Nightwaves: Nigel Floyd, film critic and Lizzie Francke (UK Film Council) discuss whether it's justifiable, a good thing, that the Film Council has set aside funds for celebrated YBA, now middle-aged and looking for the Next Big Thing, to make films. The disingenuity with which Lizzie Francke, an intelligent, knowledgeable woman, answered Nigel Floyd's assertion that it was all, finally and essentially, about brand, was dispiriting. Of course it's about brand. Marketing. Why not just acknowledge it up front? Unless, she truly believes that what she's up to, what the film council is up to, is encouraging imaginative new approaches to the activity of making films. If she really lacks the critical distance to acknowledge that brand names in the world of the YBA, as in 90s New York with fading celeb artists like Julian Schnabel, drive these initiatives then, - well the ideology has triumphed. The conventional tends to supercede any interesting filmmaking (whatever Nigel Floyd might say about the absence of good 'narrative' - in itself a straightjacketing formula). Those who continue to make interesting films are those who clearly have a long relationship with the medium.
In this era of fragmentation and multimedia, does anyone care? Is it possible to oto make an argument for aesthetic judgement any longer. It requires the foundational basis of knowledge, of comparative and detailed analyses, of an ability to engage in close reading. To be able to think deeply, not simply on the surface. Taste is not a criteria. Opnion doesn't count. Theory is not an argument. Neither is the ability to achieve a finished, accomplished, piece of creative work evidence.
Who can write, nowadays, meaningful criticism?
Thursday, 3 December 2009
Literary Fiction. Dead.
What is literary fiction? How to distinguish it from commercial fiction and does anyone care? And what about the in-between: that middle-brow, pleasing-to-chattering-class fiction that is so adored by editors and markets.
Literary fiction, as I have known it, loved it, and tried to write it, is difficult to find in the anglophone world of writing.
A psychological intensity (roman d'analyse), a palpable sense of interiority, an exactitude in language, that ineffable thing referred to as 'voice', a singularity of observation - gone. Risk. Who is taking any kind of risk? What is at stake? The urgency has disappeared from the act of writing. In its place exists graphomania, which, like all mania, has a strong autoerotic component. Exception: who writes with a real sense of urgency? Jonathan Franzen (sentimentality pervades his characters, plot is predictable, he lacks rigour, and his characters' tend to remain on the surface, schema overrides depth - but these are all grouches. What is felt in his writing is his urgency, his sense that something literary is at stake, an energy. He is not being 'clever' - that awful tic of so many British writers).
So the idea of risk is attached to notions of brand and sales. What is at stake is an author's bank account, an editor's ego, a publishers' growth (note: different measure than in days of yore when a small profit of margin was desirable, not a continuing push to 'growth'. Surely, this kind of inflationary pressure will cause the balloon to burst. And it did, but has it changed the ways in which editors read books?)
And where are the editors with a lived experience of the literary? What is a literary eduction? Very simply, someone who reads a lot, has read a lot, has a profound and enveloping love of books; whose engagement in a manuscript summons up ghosts of multiple authors, and multiple books from eras, epochs, cultures that preceded our own and surround our own. For whom the first question is not: 'will this sell?' but 'what is the author trying to do?' Now it seems most editors want to run the company, have bonuses and praise showered on them. They are primary, not the writer.
What is in its place?
Middle-brow, plot-led, soft realism.
Splashy bragadoccio storytelling.
Cartoon.
History posing as narrative.
Narrative posing as imagination.
Research in lieu of ideas.
Places in lieu of character.
Adolescent: stories, sensibilities. Whether clever or delicate, in-your-face or thoughtful, an emotional range which tips 30 at its outer limit.
And what about the exotic, the post-colonial posing as 'international'? Has cleverness superceded deep imagination?
Then there is the problem of sentimentality, and the connection between a disturbing rise in emotional kitsch and political correctness. Or sensationalism (grossness) posing as darkness, an outer edge of psychological register.
All is lifestyle. The capitalist-consumers have won. And no one even knows it.
READ Desperate Characters by Paula Fox READ Sleepless Nights by Elisabeth Hardwick
Literary fiction, as I have known it, loved it, and tried to write it, is difficult to find in the anglophone world of writing.
A psychological intensity (roman d'analyse), a palpable sense of interiority, an exactitude in language, that ineffable thing referred to as 'voice', a singularity of observation - gone. Risk. Who is taking any kind of risk? What is at stake? The urgency has disappeared from the act of writing. In its place exists graphomania, which, like all mania, has a strong autoerotic component. Exception: who writes with a real sense of urgency? Jonathan Franzen (sentimentality pervades his characters, plot is predictable, he lacks rigour, and his characters' tend to remain on the surface, schema overrides depth - but these are all grouches. What is felt in his writing is his urgency, his sense that something literary is at stake, an energy. He is not being 'clever' - that awful tic of so many British writers).
So the idea of risk is attached to notions of brand and sales. What is at stake is an author's bank account, an editor's ego, a publishers' growth (note: different measure than in days of yore when a small profit of margin was desirable, not a continuing push to 'growth'. Surely, this kind of inflationary pressure will cause the balloon to burst. And it did, but has it changed the ways in which editors read books?)
And where are the editors with a lived experience of the literary? What is a literary eduction? Very simply, someone who reads a lot, has read a lot, has a profound and enveloping love of books; whose engagement in a manuscript summons up ghosts of multiple authors, and multiple books from eras, epochs, cultures that preceded our own and surround our own. For whom the first question is not: 'will this sell?' but 'what is the author trying to do?' Now it seems most editors want to run the company, have bonuses and praise showered on them. They are primary, not the writer.
What is in its place?
Middle-brow, plot-led, soft realism.
Splashy bragadoccio storytelling.
Cartoon.
History posing as narrative.
Narrative posing as imagination.
Research in lieu of ideas.
Places in lieu of character.
Adolescent: stories, sensibilities. Whether clever or delicate, in-your-face or thoughtful, an emotional range which tips 30 at its outer limit.
And what about the exotic, the post-colonial posing as 'international'? Has cleverness superceded deep imagination?
Then there is the problem of sentimentality, and the connection between a disturbing rise in emotional kitsch and political correctness. Or sensationalism (grossness) posing as darkness, an outer edge of psychological register.
All is lifestyle. The capitalist-consumers have won. And no one even knows it.
READ Desperate Characters by Paula Fox READ Sleepless Nights by Elisabeth Hardwick
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