MARCHE INTO REJECTION HELPS YOUR WRITING CAREER
STEPHEN MARCHE:
Biblioasis March 8th talk wasn’t just any old flop
As usual I arrived too early. Biblioasis staff were still putting up chairs and laying out cheese and crackers. Owner Dan Wells and author Stephen Marche were sitting at the front window of the bookstore, drinking wine, and trying to make two microphones work (not a great team, but they did get them working).
Said “Hi” and bought a copy of Stephen Marche’s new On Writing & Failure: Or, On The Peculiar Perseverance Required to Endure the Life of a Writer.
I thought $16 was a rather expensive price for a 73-page book. Oh well, I had an hour to kill, and I could break tradition and actually read a title before the book launch started. I left the store and shuffled down to Timmies near the train station (my home away from home), grabbed a coffee, sat at a window booth looking over a busy busy Wyandotte and started to speed read.
I actually finished before killing my medium coffee. Didn’t win anything when I virtually “Rolled Up The Rim to Win”, figured Marche’s Field Book was a better deal than the brew.
It was ten-to-seven, and I hoofed it pronto to the launch. Dashed in with a minute to spare. I grabbed the last chair beside a man who described himself as Windsor’s lawn mower to the hoi polloi.
He might be working on a Rose City gardener’s tell-all book. Why do I say this? He, like, several other people in the audience, had note pads on their knees. Looked like a lot of writers, wannabes and students were there to take notes and how to pitch their manuscripts.
Not everyone needed a pen and paper to record what was about to go down. Looked like CBC producer Suzanna Craiggs had plugged a tape recorder into the store’s notoriously wonky sound board. In front of me, author Karl Jirgens was taking pictures as Marche and Wells crawled back through the packed room to take their seats once again in front of the picture window.
This was not your average book launch where the emcee makes a quick introduction and leaves letting the writer take out speaking notes and talk/read for the next ten minutes and then reads from the book for another twenty. There are usually thirty-minutes, of answering questions and then it is the grand finale; the author takes out a Speedo pen and pushes product.
No, at this launch Wells stayed up at the front with the author and had a relaxed and engaging conversation together followed by a 2-page reading. Pre show boozing might have had something to do with the relaxed, laughed filled stage conversation. As Marche told the audience, everyone wants to hear about suicides and book pitch failures!
And while Wells did ask some bookie questions, author Marche took the opportunity to ask questions of the Biblioasis publisher to get the inside scoop on the publishing business when it comes to selling Canadian books.
Tall, trim and dressed like he is on his way to Starbucks not a book reading. At 47 he doesn’t look his age, his daily 10k walks are doing the trick.
The former creative writing professor (he has a PhD from the UofT) is very self- effacing as he tells Wells about his constant rejections from editors and publishers. Yet he was very much full of himself and his writing skills and happy to tell us all about it.
He says that he has learned from every one of the 10,000+ rejection notices he has received from his constant writing pitches. He works non-stop to sell his articles,
essays, articles and books! He urges the room to make every rejection a tool when pitching again (and pitch as often as you can, he recommends).
Marche nods at the audience and says a writer can make a living if one is aware of what is happening in the market at any given time. There is a gasp from the student peanut gallery when he recommends they not pitch fictional short stories. “How many do you think a short story collection would sell today, Dan. 300 copies?” he asks his publisher.
Wells nods. The two men agree that nonfiction is where it is at in Canada these days. I can hear pens madly scratching.
Were some dreams just dashed? Probably.
On Writing & Failure: Or, On The Peculiar Perseverance Required to Endure the Life of a Writer is a real hodgepodge of random thoughts. It is not a well thought out book: it is a mash-up of three articles and a whack of magazine columns he has written in the past.
He talks the same way this book reads. Haphazard. Rehearsed humour. Hubris, even as he stresses his failures. A nice guy. A true Canadian.
I did get a question in during a lively post reading Q&A. I asked him if had regrets leaving his New York City university post to Canada when his wife took a job in Toronto. His reply? No. “I wouldn’t have a daughter if we stayed in the US.” He said the relaxed life style, the lower cost of living and getting paid in US dollars for much of his work meant that he didn’t suffer the stress that fellow freelance authors face in NYC! Relax he told would be authors.
Despite the brevity of the book and its unfinished nature, Wells tells me it is selling well. “He has gotten more stellar reviews in the US (NPR, New York Times, The Atlantic Magazine and Washington Post in the last month than in Canada (Toronto Globe and Mail, Toronto Star).”
He apparently gave the Detroit Free Press an interview earlier in the day. The take-away is that Marche always works and never says no.
He ends the night assuring us he knows what he is talking about. According to his bio he has six books under his belt (Wikipedia wrongly says five). He describes himself as a novelist, essayist, and cultural commentator. He has written monthly magazine columns, opinion pieces, articles and essays for the New Yorker, the New York Times, The Atlantic, Esquire, The Walrus, and many others.
He lives in Toronto with his wife and children about 10 blocks and a couple million dollars south from where I live.
By STEPHEN WEIR march 2023
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