Muckraking by Jessica Zellers

David Wright is insane. He’s doing two presentations in one day.

So he’s insane, but he’s also a library celebrity. He writes for, like, everyone in the library world. He’s a readers’ advisor with the Seattle Public Library, and I privately suspect that he’s read every book ever written. That’s how knowledgeable this guy is. It’s disgusting. Makes the rest of us look like chopped liver.

David moderated the presentation. Guess who needed moderating?

C’mon, guess.

Okay, I’ll tell you. There were three people. One was Carrie Somebody, a senior publisher with HarperCollins. (Sorry! Didn’t catch her last name!). One was Kelly Link, one of the hottest—and best—new names in fantasy and short fiction.

And the third person was Zane. If you haven’t heard of Zane by now, you’ve been living in a cave at the bottom of a remote mountain somewhere. A cave with, like, dragons guarding the moat around it. Sounds neat. I’ve always wanted a moat.

So, right, the presentation. David started by explaining the age group in question, young adults—not the 13-18 crowd, but the folks one rung up, the twenty-somethings. We don’t see them in the library too often. They graduate and get a job and a life but they don’t go to the library. It’s like the library waves bye to them when they leave college: “So long! Come back when you have kids!�

And yet, says David, twenty-somethings are some of the most exciting and enthusiastic readers to serve. They’re looking for meaning in what they’re reading. It’s not just a pastime for them.

Why aren’t the twenty-somethings coming into the library? Well, face it: libraries aren’t exactly cool. And it’s not like you can go out, get a tattoo, and transform into a cool person. Tattoos aren’t the answer. If you’re out of touch and get a tattoo, you’ll just be an out-of-touch person with a tattoo.

[Commentary from the blogger: I have five piercings and two tattoos, but I’m twenty-six. I think I’m supposed to.]

So don’t run out and get pierced unless you really want to. If you want to impress your twenty-somethings, you have to be conversant in the kinds of things these readers are looking for. That’s what makes you cool.

How do you get in touch with what they’re reading? Forget the standard mainstream media. Oprah can’t help you with this. Instead, try the alternative media, including underground publications and blogs. If you’re not reading the online community, you’re losing touch with the younger crowd. That’s all there is to it.

But don’t despair! You may be able to find some common ground with these folks in the older authors. The twenty-somethings aren’t just reading the most recent or the hottest authors. You may have a lot of success with cult fiction, for instance.

For instance, you can try pushing Dostoevsky, who incidentally is this blogger’s very favorite novelist. Know why alternative, anti-mainstream culture is called “underground� culture? It’s because of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground. You might also have luck pushing Henry Miller, William S. Burroughs, Charles Bukowski, and Hunter S. Thompson. Sure, they’re older, but they are unfiltered and real and genuine.

Or try some of the newer cult authors, the post-modernist sorts such as David Foster Wallace, Mark Danielewski, and several others whom I will not admit that I’ve never heard of.

Or go whole hog and get yourself acquainted with an emerging genre, slipstream, aka neo-fabulism. These surreal books leave the ground of naturalism and take you into strange and wonderful places. Try Haruki Murakami, for instance, a weird but very accessible writer who includes lots of pop references. Or try Kelly Link, who starts out normal but then sends you to really odd places.

The point to remember is that slipstream is not your typical, mainstream sort of genre. It’s moving around all the edges you want to put around it. This is what it means for a lot of readers. It’s something just a little different.

Who else might work for your twenty-somethings? There’s Chuck Palahniuk, who takes special pains to be visceral and shocking. Or maybe try Indie Lit star Dave Eggers. (Remember him? He wrote A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius). Or just try getting ideas from the books Best American Nonrequired Reading and Best American New Voices or magazines McSweeney’s or The Believer.

Memoirs, especially those concerning dysfunction and addiction, tend to be popular. You can call on Sylvia Plath and The Bell Jar, or go with something more recent, such as Running with Scissors or Another Bullshit Night in Suck City. These books are striking for their tone: despite the horrific events, they are disaffected, droll, and disturbingly funny.

And then of course there’s Lynda Barry. (This blogger would like to take the opportunity to implore you to introduce yourself to Lynda. One! Hundred! Demons! is a good starting point, or you could go with my personal favorite, Naked Ladies! Naked Ladies! Naked Ladies!)

Then David said something which I think is very much worth quoting verbatim:

“If you’re one of those people who’s still on the fence about graphic novels, you really need to get off.�

This means you.

David regretted that he was unable to spend much time discussing graphic novels, but he recommended using Drawn and Quarterly as a good way to get a feel for what’s going on with GNs these days.

Then David moved on to talking about Street and Urban fiction. A bit of definition, here: Street Lit is a violent genre. It’s about life on the streets, about thug life. Its characters are usually racial minorities. Street Lit is a sub-genre of Urban Lit, a broader term for literature about racial minorities, but which does not necessarily include a violent component. Street Lit is an exploding genre, with Vickie M. Stringer, Iceberg Slim, Chunichi, and Donald Goines being some of the biggest names.

Though Street Lit books are violent, they don’t usually preach. They don’t moralize. They just tell it like it is.

The hallmark book of Street Lit is The Coldest Winter Ever, by Sister Souljah. It’s a wonderful crime family saga, not dissimilar to the Sopranos, if you want to think of it like that.

“You need to read this,� said David. “It will give you something in common with so many of your readers.�

Let me repeat that again, because I think it’s so important: you need to read The Coldest Winter Ever.

Very many Street Lit authors are self-published, or else started off that way before they got big. Vickie M. Stringer, (founder and publisher of Triple Crown) for instance, decided to write a book about her experiences while she was in jail doing time for drugs. The publishers didn’t want it, so Stringer published it herself, a process that’s much easier now than ever before.

The ease of self-publishing means that we’re seeing movements from the ground up. We’re getting to see new authors coming out of nowhere. It’s actually a selling point. The raw voice of the self-published Street Lit author is authentic. It’s life on the streets from people who really know what it’s like. It’s not the sissified mainstream version. It’s the real deal.

What should delight every librarian in the land is that books are part of the hip-hop culture. There’s bling, there’s jewelry, and now there are books. The books are bringing people into the library who are not used to reading.

“And then,� said David, “we get to Zane.�

Zane writes erotica: frank, freaky erotica. It is very graphic, titillating, and exciting. What’s interesting about Zane’s books is that she started online a decade ago. She just wrote a few erotica pieces and tossed them online. It snowballed from there. She came out of nowhere. Now she’s opened a bookstore called Zane’s Endeavors, she’s gone mainstream with Strebor, and she’s expanding into videos, film, lingerie, and sex toys. It’s entrepreneurial craziness.

So, David summarized, remember this:

No tattoos or piercings are required
Listen to your patrons
Pay attention to what they’re reading
Find clues as to what they like in pop culture: TV, magazines, websites, and blogs. “Even an hour every week [with this stuff] will make you cooler, really.�

Then we got to hear from the panelists. These transcriptions are not necessarily verbatim, but the spirit of the comments has been preserved:

Carrie: I think what we’re finding is that what was old is new again. We’re seeing a lot of young writers out there.

Kelly: The biggest change we’ve seen is the way that readers find books. If you read a novel and love it you go online and find an interview the author’s done, find people talking about it. We need more communication between the online communities and libraries. A lot of people now, when they’re looking for books, are going to blogs first.

Zane: I have a blog on MySpace. I do read and recommend a lot of books. I started out on the Internet. I never intended to put out a book until people clamored for it. Word of mouth is very, very important. This year we’re doing 60 books—five books a month.

David: What if librarians are new to this? What can they do?

Carrie: Do MySpace. It’s really easy. Start making friends. Meet authors, people in the community, local coffee shops, local bookstores… Encourage patrons to blog on that MySpace page. I can’t figure out my TiVo, so for me to be able to do this—that’s how technically easy it is. MySpace is free. I highly recommend it.

Kelly: One of the things the lit bloggers do is, they create community, they create connections. Because there are a great many readers now who are not just fans of one category of fiction but who want to browse in lots of places. When I was in my 20s I would go around to the different genres and I would feel a little bit self conscious. Now there are a lot of readers out there who read in different genres.

David: There’s this whole kind of question of genre, for librarians. What does genre matter anymore?

Kelly: I worked in a children’s bookstore for a long time. Categories are useful for finding books. But the more you read, the more fearless you come about seeking out books that aren’t necessarily intended for you in your genre. Genre is useful but there’s more adventure if you’re going to a lot of different sections. Find ways to encourage the readers who like to migrate between these different categories.

Zane: Try to get the email of everyone who comes into the door of your library. That’s one way I’ve been successful in keeping up with readers. It’s a way to let people know what’s coming out.

David: Zane, this is something that librarians deal with a lot: your books are seen as controversial. There are concerns among some communities about graphic sex in books. There are no euphemisms in your books, no “manhoods rising.� What about age appropriateness?

Zane: There’s nothing I can do to prevent younger readers from reading my books. They’re intended for twenty-somethings, but I know I have a lot of younger readers. As for the controversy, no, I don’t sugarcoat anything. But my books are about a whole lot more than that: I believe that women shouldn’t be walking away from sex, no more than men. Also, most women aren’t comfortable discussing sex. I think if I can empower women to talk about sex it will trickle over into other areas of their lives. It can make them more confident. America is still a sexually repressed country. We accept violence more than sex. How come it’s okay to see someone’s head chopped off on TV but not to see sex?

David: Why don’t men read erotica?

Zane: Well, I know a lot men who do, but my books are usually written for women, women’s issues. A lot of men write to me and tell her that their wives are hot now, after having read my books.

…Then we had questions from the audience.

Audience question: Are there any recommendations for more conservative communities?

Carrie: I’d go back to the classics, like Brave New World or A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.

Audience question: Thanks for Magic for Beginners, Kelly. Thanks, Zane, for bringing new readers into the library. Would it be possible for you to direct people to the library, have them ask the library to request these authors?

Panelists: Yes!

Audience question: Your books keep getting stolen, Zane. What can we say to our collection development librarians who don’t want to keep buying you?
Zane: Keep buying me anyway.

David: It’s worth the money of having stuff in the library that’s so cool that people don’t want to bring it back.

Audience question: I just want to recommend librarything. It’s super cheap. The suggester and unsuggester work very well. People are using their own tags.

Carrie: Blogs, tags, and word-of-mouth are vital for book recommendations.

Kelly: My favorite form of recommendations are the staff recommends displays. And any kind of display that throws together books you might not normally see together. It’s drawing from different genres, something that encourages readers to go a little bit deeper, places they might not normally go.

David: That’s the heart of RA. And for folks who still think that Web 2.0 is not relevant:
There is Web 2.0 for book lovers. We may be uncomfortable not being in a position of authority, but it’s there.

Audience question: I’m a collection development librarian. If you’re spending money to put items on the shelves to give your readers what they want… you can’t put a price on that.

[Wild applause from whole room]

Audience question: Zane, we can’t keep you on the shelf. Are you embarking on a teen book? Please?

Zane: Yes. Kids are impatient, so I want to get four written before I launch, but maybe 2008.

…And that’s it from me, folks. Did you catch that last bit? Zane’s working on a book for teens! Yippee!

This entry was posted on Monday, June 25th, 2007 at 5:39 pm and is filed under Conference Reports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.