How much would you pay for a story?

I've had an iPhone for about six months, and have had my Kindle for iPhone app about as long. I love reading with this app. So when I saw the news about the Atlantic Monthly offering Kindle-only downloads, I was very excited...until I saw the price.

Although they publish a fiction issue once a year, the Atlantic hasn't regularly published short fiction since 2005 (Sidebar: the last story the magazine ever published in the "old" format, Michael Lohre's "Bullheads", is one of my all-time favorite stories, an absolute masterpiece about growing old, sacrifice, and dying with dignity. The full-text is here . Highly, highly recommended.). Ostensibly, the magazine's new Kindle offerings--the editors hope to post two new stories a month--are meant to fill this gap.

My main gripe with the move is the asking price: each story will cost $3.99. I don't care how good the individual stories may be--$3.99 is too much to pay for one piece, considering I could download David Foster Wallace's doorstopper Infinite Jest for $9.99, the standard price for most Kindle titles, or this month's entire issue of Electric Literature (with 5 stories) for $4.95. While the editors claim that the Kindle offers the magazine an opportunity to publish novella-length fiction that won't fit in print, charging almost as much as it would cost readers to purchase a newstand issue seems puzzling, if not downright thoughtless.

My suggestion? Knock down the price a little, Atlantic editors. Perhaps to $1.59, which is how much it would cost me to download a story from Holly Goddard Jones' outstanding Girl Trouble directly from Amazon. I'd read many of the stories that appear in Jones' collection when they first appeared in literary journals (and, much later and much deservedly, in prize anthologies like New Stories from the South) and I was grateful that Amazon offered me the opportunity to download the stories I hadn't read one at a time. In fact, this "iTunes for short fiction" model is one I'd love to see e-book publishers and vendors pursue. While I've read entire novels on my Kindle for iPhone, the format seems particularly ideal for stories, which can be read in more manageable bursts. Whether something like this will become more widespread is anyone's guess (and I don't doubt for a minute that I occupy what amounts to a niche-of-a-niche market), but I don't think it's too much to ask that e-readers get their money's worth.

On Abraham Verghese and Facebook

I was fortunate enough to meet Abraham Verghese during the last year of my creative writing MFA at Texas State. Verghese gave two readings, one an excerpt from his excellent memoir The Tennis Partner, the other a selection from the novel he was in the process of completing, which turned out to be the recently-released Cutting for Stone. Verghese was what several of the MFA faculty referred to, in great admiration, as a "writer's writer," but I think what fascinated many of the creative writing students was Verghese's background as a doctor. At the time, Verghese was the director of the Center for Medical Ethics at the University of Texas Medical Branch in San Antonio, TX, and many of my peers--who were struggling to teach two sections of freshman composition a semester while endlessly revising our master's theses--were fascinated that Verghese could so successfully balance his writing with his duties as an educator and a practicing physician. His answer referred to a concept he called "pockets of time," which really boiled down to was setting out what you needed to do and then doing it. It was impossible to come away from those encounters with him and not feel inspired.

Late last week, I learned (via KevinMD) that Verghese--and his employer Stanford University--is using Facebook to hold online "open office hours," soliciting student questions and providing (as always) thoughtful, detailed answers. But what really struck me was the fact that users were actively participating in the process, writing lengthy questions about a wide variety of medical topics, continuing the conversation. This enterprise got me thinking about how academic libraries are using (or at least, attempting to use) Facebook and other social networking sites to reach out to their students. It's one thing to have a presence, but as many librarians know, it's quite another to have your target users actively engaged with that presence. Frankly, those academic libraries that do have Facebook pages are lucky if we can persuade our students to "friend" or "fan" us. In all likelihood, that's about the extent of our users' involvement.

Are Abraham Verghese's students impressed that he's on Facebook? Possibly. But it's also possible that they're grateful for the forum he's providing them. That's an important distinction, because I think that academic librarians tend to advocate for a social networking presence in order to impress their students, not to satisfy some crying need. I'm not saying that a crying need doesn't exist, nor that we should give up on Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, or any other popular social network as a means of marketing and advocating our services. But making our students grateful to have us there, as opposed to just being impressed, will take a concerted effort by librarians to reach people in the real world, as Dr. Verghese has done so successfully, not just in the digital one.

That's what we need to do. Why can't we just do it?

The Relaunch

As I promised in my last blog for the ACRL conference, I am reconceptualizing, rebranding, and relaunching this blog. I had abandoned it for a variety of reasons: lack of audience, lack of interest, not enough time in the day or gas left in the tank to blog anything worthwhile. But I've since seen the possible benefits of using my blog as a gateway to scholarly publication--something I'm very interested in, and have already achieved, just not in the field of librarianship--as well as a means of "getting my name out there."

At this point I should at least offer some sort of manifesto or blanket statement about the type of content you're going to see on here. But I'd prefer to just let this blog find its own niche. So expect some fits and starts, some link dumps, and more than a few tangents while I stumble around blindly. Chances are that I will manage to touch on the following topics:

-Academic librarianship
-Medical/health sciences librarianship
-Information literacy
-Bibliographic instruction
-Medical humanities
-Medical school
-Social networking media
-Literary fiction
-Writing, revising, and publication (and its more common counterpart, rejection)
-Balacing work and writing

Those last three might seem somewhat incongruous. I hold an MFA and an MLS; I am a librarian and a writer. Hence the retitling of this blog, which was formerly johnwaddyisworkingonhispectorals.blogspot.com. (A nod to both my extremely Southern given name and the opening line of Bobbie Ann Mason's classic short story "Shiloh"). But "B8527" is my last name in LC classification, and I can think of no better way to indicate my interest in, and passion for, libraries and literature.

So thanks for reading. You'll be hearing from me again shortly!

Like You Care: Favorite Short Stories of 2008

I’m proud to say that I read more than 800 short stories this year. Here are my favorites that were published within the last twelve months:

“Bill and Arlene” by Ehud Havazelet (Tin House)Revisits the same characters in Raymond Carver’s famous story “Neighbors,” a story that contains, in my opinion, one of the most shocking moments in modern short fiction. The climax of Havazelet’s story actually tops that moment.

“Tom & Jerry” by Christie Hodgen (Ploughshares)
Hodgen published two stories this year that featured Tom & Jerry as a running motif. This one, about an incredibly at-risk pregnancy, ends with one of her trademark punch-to-the-gut final paragraphs.

“Man Oh Man, It’s Manna Man” by George Singleton (Virginia Quarterly Review)
A hero for our times, this story’s title character uses mind control to make a venal, homophobic televangelist blow him through the TV screen.

“The Thirteenth Egg” by Scott Snyder (Virginia Quarterly Review)
A WWII veteran who survived the Bikini Atoll nuke tests finds himself literally glowing.

“Fetch” by Allan Gurganus (Tin House)
This white-knuckle beloved-family-dog-in-peril story appeared in the same issue of Tin House that Havazelet’s story did.

“The Dinner Party” by Joshua Farris (The New Yorker)
A story that spends this much time making fun of the movie Kung Fu Panda shouldn’t be this devastating.

“The Contents of This Shoe Box Are of Greater Worth Than Your Life” by Sean Casey (Massachusetts Review)
A jaw-droppingly scatological story about depositing bowel movements in the titular container. Oh, and did I mention that the aforementioned b.m.’s belong to Dick Cheney?

“Shakesteer’s” by James Wyatt (Cimarron Review)
Wyatt studied creative writing at the University of Missouri, and he has created the finest (and probably only) story ever based on this Columbia, Mo. institution.

“Retrospective” by Holly Goddard Jones (Kenyon Review)
This story’s signature moment is a vivid rape sequence that captures not only the terrifying nature of the encounter, but also the sickening awkwardness.

“The Last Days of Heath Ledger” by Lisa Taddeo (Esquire)
Contains the very best description of the way Jack Nicholson sits I’ve ever heard or read.