McSweeney's

The written word is not dead. It’s not fading, nor is it floundering on the surface of the deep, endless ocean that is the cyber world. In Sydney, Melbourne, London, New York and beyond, the world of independent publishing is flourishing. As I write this, sitting in the Kluster offices in Sydney’s Surry Hills, I know I would need more than three hands to begin to count the number of digital and print publications that take up residence in the converted warehouses and office spaces surrounding me. Off the top of my head. If the written word is dying, why is it still in business?

The fact of the matter is, despite what some might have you believe, the written word will not die at the hands of the internet; just as radio did not fade into obscurity at the invention of the television. It may morph, alter and experience a dumbing down via the incorrect removal of the possessive apostrophe, but it will remain. This is not The Matrix. Not yet, anyway.

Despite some recent setbacks, the independent literary scene is doing just fine in San Francisco. It’s not exactly the new New York City, or Brooklyn – if we are talking writers in the pure, struggling-artist sense – but it can lay claim to being the hometown of McSweeney’s. McSweeney’s includes the sometimes-quarterly Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, literary journal The Believer, DVD magazine Wholphin, and their contribution to the World Wide Web McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. For many a literary connoisseur, that is claim enough for one city.

In 2002, a young internet science-trivia writer with a penchant for home carpentry, Eli Horowitz, met independent author, novel and magazine publisher, Dave Eggers. At the time McSweeney’s, Eggers’ independent publishing ‘empire’, (an outfit discounted by many as too haphazard and unstructured to ever amount to anything much) had just relocated to the San Francisco bay area. According to Horowitz, the move had taken its toll on the company.

“McSweeney’s was kind of in disarray.” Explains Horowitz. “Dave had just moved from New York to San Francisco and there was all this stuff that needed to be done and no one to do it.”

Not to be discouraged by the state of affairs, Eggers had begun construction on new offices (certainly a step up from his old kitchen space in Brooklyn) and what would be the first of six national tutor and literary drop-in centres, 826 Valencia. The centre adopted its street address for a name; as did the ones that followed in Seattle, Chicago, Los Angles, New York, San Francisco and Michigan.

Bringing together people who want to help people with people who want to be helped,

The tutoring centres were a project championed by Eggers and developed with the uncomplicated aim of connecting students with tutors. Or, “bringing together people who want to help people with people who want to be helped,” as Horowitz informs me matter-of-factly when I track him down in his San Francisco office. These days he boasts the title of Publisher and/or Senior Editor.

It’s just after three in the afternoon in the bay area. Horowitz is hiding out in the McSweeney’s basement. He selected this particular room for its seclusion in the hope of facilitating an uninterrupted conversation. No dice; even in the basement he cannot find quiet. Other staffers slowly migrated there, obviously with similar intentions.

The interesting thing about the McSweeney’s prestidigitation in the face convention is that its failure to adhere to - let alone implement - a traditional structure seems to benefit the company. This slapdash approach is in almost every short story they select for publication in the Quarterly. It is in the way they select their novels. It’s what sets their literary content apart from the one-trick-horse publishing houses that pump out international best sellers. It is in the way they approach new ideas that would potentially be placed in the too-hard basket by other companies.

As Horowitz explains it, “There is one buyer for all the fiction at Barnes & Nobel. She might do a great job, but it is still only one person deciding what they are going to buy and how much. If you want anything to be based on a table [on the floor in the store], where people can see it, that is entirely based on how much money you are willing to pay them. So it’s just a whole system that doesn’t necessarily lead to good books [reaching the public]. There is nothing inherently wrong with it - they are all businesses and businesses can do whatever businesses want – the only reason people should care is: what kind of literary environment is it going to result in?”

A potentially brain-numbing one. An environment in which the Bill Cotters of the world might never be given a platform on which their words may be heard.

You could go so far as to argue that it was this very haphazardness that saved McSweeney’s in 2006, when their distribution company, Publishers West Group (PWG), collapsed. At the time of the collapse the company owed McSweeney’s upwards of $600,000. It was the independent publisher’s, at times, random structure as well as the placing of their literary eggs in many baskets, including online sales direct to the customer, that allowed them to minimise losses. Their world-famous online ‘fire sale’ enabled them to minimise the impact by selling remaining stock straight to buyers without a reliance on traditional distribution channels. That, in turn, resulted in the company being able to make its way back to solvency. A fate not shared by many of the other independent publishing houses who dealt with PWG. Many of them were forced to close their doors.

When Horowitz first met with Eggers, it was more of a right-place, right-time scenario than anything pre-planned and executed. Says Horowitz,

“The Internet was really popular out here [in San Francisco] for a while, around 2000. I was writing science trivia questions for a very quickly failing website. I quit that and then I built this shack in the woods in Virginia, where I am from, [and] that gave me some very meagre carpentry skills. I moved back here and was volunteering for our tutoring centre, 826 Valencia. And that’s how it all happened. It was really random. I read but I wasn’t even interested in literature, as a phenomenon, or publishing or anything like that.”

It seems to be that way with most things at McSweeney’s. They happen organically, in response to their surround environment. Or, in the case of the company’s choice to return to Oddi Printing in Reykjavik for the creation of Issue 30 of the Quarterly, a response to world issues: the global economic crisis crippling Iceland.

There is openness to their selection process that is almost unheard of in contemporary publishing (if, perchance you doubt what I say, a quick perusal of Cat Juan’s article on Page Six should clarify matters somewhat). According to Horowitz, and the McSweeney’s submissions page, all submissions are placed in one big pile and all are attended to in due course.

...I don’t fetishize the printed page as some perfect godly invention, but we’re all still a long way from a world in which physical objects don’t have real power.

He says, “We designed the whole thing so it is open to everyone and doesn’t prioritise anyone depending on who they are, or whether they have an agent, or where they went to school.”

That is not to say that there are not measures in place. Horowitz does admit final selections are obviously dependant on the taste of the editor that picks up the manuscripts, but the pile is not a slush pile and all words will eventually be allotted a reader.

A quick scan of the contributors list found in the back of each Quarterly confirms Horowitz’s claim. Names of authors never before published, or those only published in small-scales literary journal, are followed by the likes of Stephen King, Zadie Smith and Joyce Carol Oates. It’s the McSweeney’s way. If you build it they will come. If you write it, McSweeney’s will read it. Publishing deal pending, of course.

As for the future of McSweeney’s in the digital age. According to Horowitz, “Someday everything will be null and void, including print and puppies and even Twitter. For the time being, there are still things we can do with print that we can’t do online — and vice versa. We just like to explore the possibilities of whatever form we’re working with. I don’t fetishize the printed page as some perfect godly invention, but we’re all still a long way from a world in which physical objects don’t have real power.”

For the sake of my earlier-proposed argument, I think it is important at this juncture, that I disclose just how popular the 826 Valencia centres have become in recent years. The onsite fieldtrips made available to schools in the surrounding areas are, in some cases, booked ahead up to a year in advance. And the drop in services offered by the centres, according to information Eggers imparted in an address to the audience at a recent Authors Guild gala, are bustling learning environments, brimming with children on any given afternoon. Children developing their writing skills, none the less.

The supply stores found at the front of each tutoring centre – an attempt to bypass the retail zoning at the first 826 site – certainly help create a childlike point of difference to other tutoring centres. They are stores dedicated to the sale of items literally suggested by their names. At San Francisco’s Pirate Supply Store, eye patches, ocean maps, and planks are commonly exchanged for cash. In New York’s Super Hero Store customers are required to recite the vow of heroism before being permitted to purchase.

Still, a Pirate, Super Hero and Secret Agent Supply Store are no more likely to get a kid’s homework done than an ill-intended, overbearing mother. That kind of daily dedication to learning requires a desire that must come from the child, interest in the subject matter – in this case, the written word – and support from adults willing and able to devote their time. At the risk of coming across a little Whitney’s ‘Greatest Love of All’, the future of writing lies in maintaining that interest. So then, the children are our future.