Overland literary journal

OVERLAND 191
ISBN 978-0-9775171-8-3
winter 2008
published 23 May 2008

A SHORT TOUR THROUGH THE INDEPENDENTS

Ben Peek

• Andrew Macrae and Keith Stevenson (eds): c0ck (Coeur de Lion, ISBN 0646462067, $15)
• Ivana Hruba: The Ascension of Phoebus Klein (self-published, no ISBN, no price listed)
• David Cohen: Fear of Tennis (Black Pepper, ISBN 9781876044558, $25.95)
• Stuart Forsyth: Personal Taxidermy (Vanark, ISBN 9780980350012, $23.95)
• Zoe Dattner and Louise Swinn (eds): The Sleepers Almanac No. 4 (Sleepers Publishing, ISBN 9781740666107, $24.95)

The diversity of independent press scenes around the world attracts me as both a reader and an author. The two outlooks have a curious push and shove relationship, as one of the first things I think when I hear about a new publisher is, “What do they do?”, not just so that I can gauge my tastes as a reader but also to satisfy my professional interest. This is especially the case in Australia where mainstream publishers are homogenised and unwilling to take risks, resulting in what I view as a culture of white, middle-class novels based in either realism or fantasy. To my mind, Australian authors have a responsibility to keep an eye on both mainstream and independent presses – just as a reader should likewise be watching both in order to escape the vanilla centre of Australian literature.

It was interesting to note that Mark Davis’ article in Overland 190, which was primarily about the independent press, failed to mention any independent publishers with less profile than Text, Black Inc. or Melbourne University Publishing. The moments where Davis talked about the content of books and the authors who wrote them seemed only to support some of his more idealistic comments. The claim that literature will gain readers when it is relevant, for example, is nicely idealistic, but his name-checking of Richard Flanagan and Kate Grenville for, I assume, The Unknown Terrorist and The Secret River, reveals a flaw in the argument: both authors had established audiences and publication records before the books were released. In addition to that, the latest work from each is ‘relevant’ in a very general way, covering as they do the culture of fear and terrorism in the twenty-first century and early settlement behaviour towards Aboriginal people. Neither is shining a new light on an undiscovered topic.

In response, I wanted to take a small tour through the content of the lesser-known independent presses of Australia. It is not comprehensive, and does not aim to be, but it will introduce the reader to the positives and the negatives of independent books with which they may not be overly familiar.

c0ck, for example, is a collection edited by Andrew Macrae and Keith Stevenson, and released by the new press, Coeur de Lion. It offers eleven speculative fiction stories that question and problematise the male perspective. Masculinity is a topic of increasing relevance, with male perspectives, expectations and lifestyles questioned more than ever before. The themes of the masculine gaze and identity do not truly emerge into an argument in the book as a whole, leaving you with the sense that it missed its intended mark – though whether by a lot or a little will depend on your appreciation of the individual stories. Chris Lawson’s piece, ‘The Pheromone Tango’, offers clichés about the relationships between men and women, and I had problems with the groaning metaphors of masculinity in Stephen Dedman’s ‘Cutback’. As compensation, there are excellent stories such as Paul Haines’ ‘The Devil in Mr Pussy (or How I Found God Inside My Wife)’, a witty, bad taste comedy about pregnancy, sex and eating cat food, and Jacinta Butterworth’s ‘Love Affair’, which has a rawness to it which might be compared to Kathy Acker – never a bad thing.

What I do want to note, however, is the design of c0ck, which had benefited from the independent press’ freedom. You cannot help but admire a publisher who releases their first book, titles it c0ck and packages it as a slim, tiny black object with only the word ‘cock’ on the back and front to give the reader any indication of what the book is about. It is not just a moment of design brilliance, it is a statement from the publisher about how they approach their status in the publishing industry, showing their willingness to package and design to complement their non-mainstream content.

Unfortunately, while I can praise c0ck, there are more than enough books put out by independent publishers that lack any design sense. Part of this might be attributed to the rise of printing technology that is affordable and easily obtained, and the lack of any controls over starting a press. Now you merely have to want to publish a book to be able to do so, and so the field of independents is strewn with poorly designed, poorly executed, self-published novels such as (to take an example at random) The Ascension of Phoebus Klein, written and published by Ivana Hruba. There is nothing about the novel worth recommending, other than its utility as a torture device for teenagers forced to read 244 pages of a first-person narrator who stutters.

Hruba’s novel demonstrates just how technically easy it is to do it yourself in the publishing industry these days, and how little experience you need to get a book out. You could draw a comparison to the independent music scene which has, through self-released albums, opening acts and cheap pub band tickets, developed a path for new bands to learn their skill and find an audience. The accessibility of new publishing technology might produce books like The Ascension of Phoebus Klein, but it also allows the audience to engage in a reading practice that mirrors that of the independent music scene: a reader can now watch an author grow, and can experience him or her finding his or her audience, voice and interests.

On the level of design, the books published by Black Pepper fall into the same category as Hruba’s. The poorly designed and poorly titled Fear of Tennis, by David Cohen, features an ugly green cover with a blocky drawing of a man in a white T-shirt and white shorts holding a tennis racquet. No description, I’m afraid, will do it justice, but if you have seen the book in the store and avoided it, thinking that it was a book from the part of the independent press reserved for family members of authors, I could not fault you. Black Pepper’s design, fortunately, is not representative of the content of Cohen’s book: a dry-humoured novel featuring the obsessive-compulsive Mike Planner who works as a courtroom sound-recorder and practises his smiles in the toilet mirror. The novel begins when Planner sees an old school friend, Jason Blunt, on a bus and feels that he owes him for an incident in their childhood where the latter took the blame for something that the former did (how’s that for avoiding spoilers?). Unaware of this, Blunt, caught in his own obsession with tennis, invites Planner to join him and his coach, Gary, an ex-pro player who never plays but who instead takes photos of Blunt playing.

I found Fear of Tennis a little strained by the end of 200 pages, as Planner’s obsessive-compulsive nature, in combination with tennis itself, was not exactly to my taste. I would have liked a little more time devoted to Fiona, the student of religion on whom Planner develops a crush after she steals his cup – but I suspect I would have gone for anything that would have taken me away from the tennis. Regardless, Cohen’s writing is tight, detailed, and the dialogue rarely skips a beat. Also to the book’s credit – and I feel this should be mentioned, given the awful design – is that it is free from the missing indentations, lost speech marks and grammatical mistakes that plague the independent presses.

Indeed, editing is one of the main flaws of the independent scene. A lot of publishers, no matter the distribution or publicity profile, are run with a small number of staff and with profit margins that encourage the DIY ethic in which editors take on multiple roles: design, copy editing, structural edits and so forth. Consequently, you will find more than a few riddled with interior mistakes – from layout to typos, from the basic, to the impressive-fuck-up-of-a-whole-book. Such things matter: each mistake draws readers out of their suspension of disbelief, and changes the reading experience.

Vanark Press’ release of Stuart Forsyth’s Personal Taxidermy contains more than its acceptable share of typos, mixed-up lines of dialogue, tense switches and odd perspective changes. It’s a novel in desperate need of a strong editorial hand but, with its professional design, looks more inviting than the books released by Black Pepper. The novel tells the story of Widmo, a young boy suffering from amnesia who in the opening pages stumbles upon Natalie, who is being raped. His presence frightens off her assailant and Natalie takes him back to her apartment to look after him. The problems begin in these first pages: clichéd characterisation (such as Natalie-the-coked-out-whore-with-a-heart-of-gold-who-just-needs-some-understanding-and-love) and characterisation that just doesn’t work, such as the hotel owner who helps Widmo in the final stages of the book. The story arc around Bebel, the mysterious and elderly woman who works in Indy Maru’s restaurant, doesn’t fit comfortably, perhaps because Forsyth attempts to marry Bebel’s importance to both Maru’s lost family and Widmo’s amnesia.

In truth, Personal Taxidermy is a mess. Yet there’s an energy to the book. Perhaps because of its quirkiness, perhaps because Forsyth’s detailed prose becomes occasionally darkly beautiful, or perhaps because he experiments with different fonts and styles, the novel is compelling, even if it doesn’t quite work. Or perhaps it is Forsyth’s obvious potential that is attractive. In any case, he is an author to watch; a second novel from him would be worth purchasing, particularly to support his development as an writer. It is a long road to being an author with an interesting and diverse body of work: one that, in many ways, mainstream publishers and the industry as a whole do not encourage. The workshops and long lists of advice result too often in novels with a uniformly clean style and stripped-back content. In contrast, there is nothing wrong in seeing an artist, all rough edges and energy, grow.

By and large, the independent-released anthologies of each year in Australia are the main place that readers will be able to hear authors gain their voices. In the case of The Sleepers Almanac No. 4, this also applies to the editors and publishers, Zoe Dattner and Louise Swinn, since the reader will, upon seeing the book, make the immediate connection to McSweeney’s. McSweeney’s, if you haven’t heard of it, is a quarterly anthology out of the States with a reputation for beautiful, but ever-changing, book design, and quirky, offbeat stories. Sleepers is obviously influenced by the reputable collection, as is made clear by the altered book details inside, the quirky quizzes taken from Robert Heinlein, and lists of books and TV shows the editors have enjoyed. The too-strong influence of an already existing series does diminish Sleepers compared to someone like Forsyth (whose influences are less obvious) – but then, if you are going to be inspired, there are few better publications to be inspired by.

The book is primarily made up of new authors, a large portion of their stories relying on quirk, such as Jeff Hoogenboom’s ‘The Miracle of the Beer and Tim Tams’ – where Jesus comes over for dinner – or on relationships that have the shallowness of people’s in their early twenties, such as Jo Bowers’ ‘Game’. There are established authors here, but they are, to be polite, slumming it – it’s been a long-held belief in the independent press that, for collections to sell, a few name authors must be included. As most of the books do not pay professional rates, the fiction that they end up with from the name authors is bottom-drawer stuff. An example is Max Barry’s contribution, ‘A Shade Less Perfect’, which is about children and vampires and werewolves, and leaves the reader groaning at its idiocy. The true joy of reading Sleepers lies not in what the established authors are (or aren’t) doing, but in the discovery of writers who have a little something extra to distinguish themselves. Where else but in a collection like Sleepers would I find Jessica Au’s story about struggling immigrant worker, ‘Leopards’? Writing in a beautifully strong, clear voice, Au was the find of the book for me, and I would readily buy more work from her.

I have tried to show the diversity that exists in the independent scene, and the variety of reading experiences that are accordingly open to the reader who embraces it. In Overland 190, Mark Davis asked what exactly literature was for, and how to define it. He noted how the answer was difficult to find. I would like to suggest that literature is a connection between you and another: a shared experience, a way of seeing the world differently, an exposure to ideas with which you both agree and disagree. Just as there are many different experiences in life, there are many different ways to read. Enjoyment might come from watching authors grow, or from literature’s inherent intellectual stimulation, or the experience might be a tool for relaxation. Literature, in its vast multiplicity, is capable of providing all these experiences to you. That’s what the independent scene in Australia, and indeed, throughout the world, provides.

Ben Peek is the author of Twenty-Six Lies/One Truth and Black Sheep. He can be found at
<benpeek.livejournal.com>.
© Ben Peek
Overland 191 – winter 2008, pp. 85-87

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