It was at Bennington College, formerly an all-woman’s school gone co-ed seven years previous–450 women and 150 men at the time of my attendance–that I met my third great writing teacher, Nick Delbanco, and my third great friend, Marc Falcone. Bennington dorms were two-story, white New England clapboard houses abutting a baseball-large field on three sides. The fourth side had a middle distance view of the White Mountains and which ended at a small rock wall the students labeled “The End of the World”. The school resembled a Vermont village ala Grandma Moses and an atmospheric cross between a David Bowie concert, the Grateful Dead, and a 50′s beatnik hangout in the Village. It had a Black Music department, an extensive modern dance facility, no grades and no exams. Affairs were encouraged between faculty and students. Drugs, drinking, sex, various other forms of exotica, and remarkable hard work were all de rigueur.

Born in Pittsfield, one hour due south on Route 7, I was the only local at the school. The majority of the student body was from New York and Los Angeles, a smattering from Boston and Washington, a pittance from overseas. I was the country mouse to their town mice: I’d never attended private schools as they had, nor traveled, nor dressed, nor read the books nor seen the movies they’d seen. I didn’t even know what a cappuccino was. Yes, a country mouse filled with inchoate aspirations and no real sense of his own talent or predilections, a wildly desirous junior who searched for both transcendence and degradation all at once, a crazy, lusty mix of Henry Miller and the hallucinogenic and warrior ideas of Carlos Casteneda–remember him?

I wanted to live Siddhartha, Ken Kesey, Jack Kerouac, Camus, Stendhal’s Frederick Morel all at once. Dig that. The vitality, the great force which sent me to Israel then through Greece and Spain, which kept me up late at night listening to Coltrane and woke me early to my Corona electric typewriter and my first taste of extended hard artistic work–I wrote two short novels, I wrote a book of short stories–this overwrought, wild life, this angst which visited me nightly, like a centuries-wandering dybbuk which finally found its best place to rest–this gorgeous untamed energy which I only ever found one other time in my life when I was first married and found my way to yeshiva, this energy enlivened me, brightened me, the hard work enlightened me, and I had much to speak about with Nick Delbanco who turned me on to Malcolm Lowry’s “Under The Volcano”, and much to speak about with Marc Falcone, who turned me on to Charles Ives.

He was great, Delbanco, with his corduroy pants, bald pate with the long strands pasted cross-wise over it, handsome Sephardi nose, coal black eyes, and a cool and sinuous manner and way of speaking that reminded me of confidence men in grade B movies. He was patient, patient, patient with foolishness–and just how did he do that, I wonder, as I look back. And he always returned papers on time, never late, and always with more remarks and comments and good cheer than even the best of them deserved.

And then there was Falcone, whose brother, Vinny was Frank Sinatra’s band leader. Marc would do an imitation of Sinatra, where he’d pinch my cheek and spit out in this Brooklyn twang, “Love ya, kid, now get outta here.” He was swarthy, moustached, handsome, talented, my first friend who had real taste. We lived together my second year at Bennington, in Helen Frankenthaler’s old studio. He got after me to wash the dishes; he got after me to read Joyce; he did wonderful imitations of golf announcers on television; he let me bum cigarettes; he loved me like a one-year younger brother; and I just sent him my book and I still love him madly back.

Growing up without much ‘life friction’ in Pittsfield, Massachusetts gave me an attenuated sense of self. I was, truth be told, a bundle of unexpressed and conflicted desires, an amalgam of yearning for degradation and transcendence all at once. And so my freshman and sophomore years at the University of Vermont were experience-seeking years, a restless quest for the fruit of the Tree of Good and Evil, years of trying to figure out how to think, how to read, how to enjoy, the limits and delineations of my mind, personality, an attempt to create stability and yet excitement, a search for how to live, the greater quest for self. Which included hours and hours of ping pong playing with Ellis Burwick (believe it or not, I was eventually the Vermont state ping pong champion), wandering cafes in Burlington, shooting pool, chasing girls, reading Hemingway and Fitzgerald again and again, listening to John Coltrane, Miles Davis, even Sun Ra, growing my hair, hitchhiking up and down Route 7, constantly rearranging the furniture in my small dormitory room.

And then amidst this chaos of a life, I met a writing teacher and a friend who was a girl. David Huddle was a southern gentleman, tall and good-looking, with a charming drawl and a gorgeous swirl of auburn hair. He’d been an intelligence officer in Viet Nam and then gotten an MFA at Columbia. He’d written with Peter Taylor, among others, and he would read Flannery O’Connor and Edna O’Brian out loud in class. He liked my writing and spent time talking books with me in his office. Wendy P. was from Concord, just outside Boston, and she had attended private schools. She was blond and pretty and well-educated and despite having a boyfriend, spent many hours educating me about college life, city life, art and art history, the pleasures of perfume, tea, dressing well, eating out, how relationships worked, even lectured me about what women want. We spent a lot of time together, her boyfriend didn’t seem to mind, and she pushed me to write and to read. She was an art history major with ambition and she applied to transfer to Vassar and was accepted.

This was a bombshell to me, losing this good friend, and it gave me the eerie feeling of being left behind, as if Nazis were chasing me and Wendy was racing away in the escape car while I was left on foot. This certainty of becoming once more friendless by losing my sole contact with what felt like higher life, of being consigned once again to what seemed a faceless lower middle class of northern Vermont, kindled within me the urgency to change, grow, escape, to have real ambition for once in my life. It was an urgency which made me imagine writing as something which could be sustaining, as a means for constituting self.

And so I reached further than I ever had, what felt like the edge of risk for me, and I decided that I would try and write for Bernard Malamud. To transfer to Bennington College was then my first real act of will, a first real act of individuation and I applied and, thankfully, was accepted. And it was at Bennington that I began to read and write seriously, to work really hard, where I first asked myself honestly what I thought about things. And it was where I met my future brother-in-law who would make my match with my wife, and where I began to to see through the fog of my too-benevolent upbringing and successive aimless existence to a certain heart of conflict, difficulty, disappointment, and possibility for joy, where I first glimpsed my way into life.

I left middle school for high school and never ran into a good writing teacher again until my second year in college—and maybe I’ll write about David Huddle next week. But many years later, many many in fact, after I graduated from Bennington College, enlisted in the Peace Corps, did my stint in yeshiva, in my father’s Kay-Bee business, after I was already married, had a couple of kids, and moved to Israel, I was lucky enough to get my first novel published—-and how can you call getting published anything but some name of Providence?—by Walker Company, now a division of Random House. And when that summer following the publication, my parents threw a signing party at the local book store in Lenox, Massachusetts, I looked up Mr. Benson’s number in the Pittsfield phone book. I called him up and invited him to the party. He showed up in golfing cap and clothes, Scottish-looking, like he’d just strode in from the links at St. Andrews. He was trimmer than I remembered him, with a cherubic pink on his cheeks. I autographed a copy of A Good, Protected Life and showed him in the Acknowledgments where I mentioned his name. He shook my hand enthusiastically as I said thanks for the great teaching those many years ago. And I heard from my mother via a friend of hers who was a guidance counselor at the middle school and witnessed this, that Mr. Benson took the book to the teacher’s room and held it up to everyone and said, “Sometimes it’s worth it.”

Technology has changed this the way it has changed all communication. Everything is instant – instant messaging, instant answers, instant stand on one foot contemplation (an oxymoron if ever I heard one).  To collaborate on a writing piece today is a fast affair. For good or better, stories can be composed quickly, reviewed quickly, and published quickly.

One of my employees recently told me about a writing circle that she belongs to. The people rarely see each other, and that’s only because they were friends before marriage and kids sucked up all their times. Now they chat and work together online. The writing circle they formed was for a short duration. Its purpose was to create a story, each participant writing a chapter. They finished the book. But now what? It needs a deep edit. The foremost question, though, is the edit to consolidate and give the piece one voice? Or is the edit to refine each individual voice to harmonize with its companions? And then what do they do with the story?

Unlimited hosting is a great boon. I said, why not host the groups on the French Creek Press site? A writer’s club can make matches between authors and provide a forum for this kind of collaboration. Each group forms around a story, book, theme, whatever the group decides. The groups sets the schedule and out comes a product at the other end. French Creek Press then steps in and creates a free eBook, free for download. Writers maintain their “byline” so to speak and are acknowledged in the front of the book. Instant publishing.

Look for more on this as I develop this idea with up and coming writers. Once the mechanism is in place French Creek Press will open it to all who aspire to write and need a forum.

Watch this space for the Writer’s Circle. And sharpen your pencils to write.

Spending time with an agent to sell the idea before the book is written may clarify whether or not the book should be written in the first place. After all, the market may already be saturated with books about how to cook frogs and other potential road kill. The time spent marketing the idea is well spent if the author discovers that and avoids one more of such books. Then again, the author might find a publisher that is interested enough and encouraging enough to start the author writing.

The alternative is also risky. If the author starts writing the book because he has a passion about foraging and using everything that he finds in the wild, he takes the risk that the book won’t sell even after it’s written. How many Euell Gibbons’ can the book industry support? (My personal opinion is that the world could use more like Mr. Euell. I can’t count how many times I’ve read his books. If you aspire to be like Mr. Gibbons and are having a difficult time finding a publisher, drop me a line.)

The variant on the basic book model is that the author takes the risk and writes the book before searching for an agent or a publisher. This is the path most new authors must take unless they are well published in venues such as newspapers or magazines. However, there are many instances when a person is recognized as a leader in their field. The publisher might approach such person to write a book, giving assistance at all stages of the book from planning to print.

After the author finishes the manuscript he starts looking for an agent. The agent takes the manuscript in hand and starts shmoozing it up. A good agent has many contacts throughout the publishing industry, each specializing in particular fields; a good agent knows to whom the book should be directed. Phone calls, meetings, lunch, calling in favors all go into the pot. The more the agent believes in the book, the harder the agent works to find a publisher.

For the sake of this model, the book gets accepted by a publisher and the cycle becomes identical to the basic book model. Revisions are made, the manuscript is proofed, typeset, proofed, and published. We’re still dealing with printed matter and one author. Next I’m going to look at ebook creation and collaboration.

Notice that I haven’t said anything about publicity in either model. That’s deliberate. Publicity and marketing of books opens up many possibilities today. This is going to be addressed in later posts.

From sleeting March rain to the humid, late-May sun, Mr. Malamud taught his one class a year, ten sessions in all. Some years he taught a course in the short story, replete with reading list and papers to write; other years he taught a writing seminar, the semester’s goal of which was to compose one short story of less than twelve double-spaced pages and then to rewrite and rewrite and rewrite it. Like his character Fidelman, Mr. Malamud’s late-in-life, ne’er-do-well painter-turned-glassblower named after his mother-in-law, a large Italian woman and featured Italian movie actress who, at the time that I knew her, had just completed a role of the older wife of a young Mafiosi where she elbows her young husband out of bed in the opening scene and tells him to get to work—like Fidelman, Mr. Malamud seemed intense and academic and fussy. He reminded me of my mother’s brother, an anthropologist, a self-scorched product of searing self-discipline, as if he’d remaindered himself to his own conception of a labor camp. But, that is getting ahead of myself. To be admitted to class, you had to submit a piece of writing—there was only room for ten students. Everyone, of course, applied. The list of who was accepted was pinned to the English department door. I don’t remember what story I submitted but I do remember that I rewrote it and rewrote it—-the fear of literary imperfection, born then, has stayed with me.

We apprentice writers who survived that gauntlet assembled in an old farm building, in a classroom of panel and roof beam. There were six women and four men. It was to be a short story year. The great man walked into class wearing a rain coat over brown khakis, a striped collared shirt, and dark sweater. He was bald on top with still-brown hair clipped short about the sides and graying sideburns, a man in his sixties. A moustache, precisely cut, spread over his generous and slightly quivering lip. He opened his briefcase and handed out copies of a syllabus—Chekhov, Hemingway, among others, Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, Sherwood Anderson (I think), even one collection of his own. His hands were delicate and mottled with age, the fingers of a man who might play Chopin or paint watercolors. He put on square, blocky glasses, accountant glasses. He read off names from a class list in a calm and measured voice, a raspy tenor’s, a stern grandfather’s voice. We raised our hands. He spoke about the book list, the papers to be written. He was a bit stiff and all business, a formal, elegant man, a man who would tolerate fools, nonsense, and late papers poorly. As Philip Roth once described him, this aging Pulitzer prize winner was a combination of pitilessness and somewhat distant, avuncular concern. And though he seemed to be strictly about business in one form or another—the business of writing, the business of being responsible to job and schedule, the business of dealing equitably with others—I sensed that he was more than the perhaps-interesting sum of his peeves and formalities. For just as his writing projected the awkward and halting and painful attempts toward an unknown and undefined transcendence, the writer, too, seemed full of a high moral seriousness that I’d never encountered.

I realized that what I beheld, charmed already, was a sage of sorts, a secular rabbi, an artist of the most rarefied kind.

Agents, publicists and publishing companies do the same with their authors. The author gets time if s/he is a best seller. The author may also get time by being a squeaky wheel, but that is only effective until the recipient recognizes the author’s phone number and doesn’t answer. What can an author do to put him/herself forward? Create an online author’s platform.

The concept of an author platform has been around for many years. This is just another name for a resume, a beefed up resume, but still a resume. The author must not only write well (sometimes I think some popular writers must have become popular because they are good marketers – their writing stinks), the author has to speak well, photograph well, display well in video recordings, and generally be an all-around good package to sell. This is a difficult pill for a budding author to swallow. When an agent/publicist/publisher wants to buy, they are not just buying a book or an idea, they are buying the author and the way the author reaches people. Many new authors focus solely on writing their books, dreaming of the Pulitzer, thinking they can work on their platform after the book is published. Unfortunately, the business doesn’t work that way. An author can’t wait until the book sells to build a platform, because the platform is what helps sell the book.

Did you follow that? The platform sells the book. It sells the book to the agent who must decide to take the risk with the author and throw time and money into getting the book in front of the publisher. The platform sells the book to the publicist who must find the right venue to market the book. And the platform sells the book to the publisher, who sees not only book sales, but speaking tours, book signing engagements, book trailers on YouTube, and a myriad of public, television, and radio appearances. The platform tells the publisher that this author has value outside the book.

The platform, the online resume, is either a web page that hangs from the publisher’s website, or it is a website dedicated solely to the author. The platform must include a clear focus on the targeted market. An author that writes children’s stories is not going to target computer engineers. Once the market is defined the rest falls into place. Press releases, blog entries, articles, pictures of events, music, anything that is related to the author can go on the platform. After the initial construction of the author platform, weekly maintenance can keep the web site/page current, active, and changing, which results in more traffic to the author platform, better SEO, and more potential money making contacts.

Contact French Creek Press services at services@frenchcreekpress.com for information about our author pages.

And so in 1975, after two years at the University of Vermont, my close friend transferred to Vassar and I took a year off and flew to Israel. I lived on two kibbutzim, Ein Charod M’euchad and Gevulot, where I drove tractors in orange groves and stamped sun-warmed cotton in big steel-mesh containers in Jordan valley dusks.
I remember warm gin-and tonics at a dusty truck stop, remarkable peanuts-in-the-shell at the Afula bus station, the blue, car-mechanic-like uniforms of the kibbutz volunteers, the simple, starchy food, the freezing winter nights, the Israelis’ barking hospitality, and how one person mooned the entire ulpan class as he spoke to the unawares Hebrew teacher.

Post-kibbutz, I traveled to Greece and then Spain and flew home and spent the summer working as a cook at the now-defunct Grossinger’s. I recall the short Jewish maitre d’ with the grim visage of an executioner, the unflappable Chinese cooks who knew the laws of kashrut, the elegant black waiter, Tony G., who drove a Thunderbird and could carry forty mains stacked on a tray on his fingertips, the late-night, cigarette-and-scotch deluged, high-stakes Puerto Rican poker games, the college waiters and waitresses, the French sou-chefs, the seersucker suit that I wore in my off hours that made me look, in retrospect, like a popsicle salesman. And I can picture the scads of overweight guests—for what did one do in the Borscht Belt in those days except eat?—the bad comedians (the only thing sadder than a bad comedian is two of them), the over-cheerful entertainment aides, the kitschy entertainment director himself who was ‘world famous’ for his comedic rendition of ‘Simon Says.’ As well, there was an every-other-day diving show at the main pool where a girl and boy from the University of Michigan diving team did fancy aerial twists and somersaults. It was impressive to see such athleticism so close-up and I got a crush on the girl, naturally, and in order to meet her I asked the pair of them to teach me how to dive. Which ended up being the scariest thing I’d ever done up until that time.

In the fall of 1976, my brother-in-law of the time and sister drove me to Bennington College, a campus of white clapboard houses set in rural Vermont. The college had gone co-ed only seven years before and there were 450 women and approximately 150 men. There was a strong air of women’s lib washing through the performance halls and dining rooms and louche morals and intense, self-absorbed creativity. The girls were pretty, studiously unimpressed by men, affairs between student and faculty members were encouraged, the food, as they say in Pittsfield, was good enough for government work, and there was a decent pool table in the student café. It was disconcerting at first to share a bathroom with three women, but after so much traveling and working, the prospect of writing with Bernard Malamud in the college’s tranquil but charged atmosphere, not to mention the other fascinating courses and array of talented people, seemed perfect to me. I’d not been around such a community of people, where hard creative work was the air that one breathed. And it was this seriousness about one’s development as an artist which was so enticing, something which I’d never encountered before.

The Pittsfield, Massachusetts of the sixties that I grew up in was a blue-collar enclave of Catholics and Protestants. It was hardly a literary hotbed though Normal Mailer lived for a while in Stockbridge and William Shirer in Lenox. Historically, in the late nineteenth century, Hawthorne and Melville resided collegially in the Berkshires, though Melville, as he was composing Moby Dick about ten minutes from the house where I grew up, scared Mrs. Hawthorne with his wild appearance and energies. Henry James would visit Edith Wharton at her estate, which was called “The Mount”, and Emerson and Thoreau were also known to pass through.

And though Pittsfield in the Woodstock era was hardly anyone’s idea of Brook Farm, I was raised in a literary household—my mother remains well-read and my father had gone for a PhD in literature at the University of Michigan. My mother gave me my first book of Malamud stories, “The Magic Barrel”, when I was about fourteen. I remember reading them as I lay on a short divan in our living room, Verdi on the turntable, my father at the desk behind me paying bills. I read the stories again and again. And then, “The Assistant”. “The Fixer”. “The Natural”. “Idiot’s First”. I branched out into Bellow and Singer and Roth but always came back to Malamud. Bellow’s style was richer, his authorial voice far more urbane.

Singer was more fanciful and exotic; Roth more provocatively sexual; and though Malamud stories were, objectively, grim, they resonated with me as presenting a greater, more transcendent reality than these other writers, texts which were both more deeply felt and morally engaged. For despite these stories’ limited venues—a tenement room, a jail cell, a grocery—there was always present the hint and whiff of Biblical grandeur. And so from early on, I wanted to meet this morally stern and ascetic, monkish Vermont writer.

He taught at Bennington College, a girl’s school gone recently coed, a course in short story reading and writing in the spring. My chance presented itself when a close friend at the University of Vermont transferred to Vassar and the prospect of remaining alone in Burlington, Vermont seized me in chilled alarm. Thus I decided to transfer to Bennington College where I imagined bowing down at Mr. Malamud’s feet and begging him to rework my rock ‘n roll-infected mind into the sensibility of a serious artist’s. Bennington College accepted me for the spring semester, I ended up taking the year off and living in Israel, and began school the following fall. I was to meet the great man for the first time in March, 1976.

I’ll speak about all that next week as well as the existential issues that meeting and befriending such a serious writer raised and continues to raise in my own life.

I asked, “What’s Woodstock?”

He said, “A music festival.”

I asked, “Where is it?”

He said, “In upstate New York, about 3 hours from here.”

I asked, “Who’s playing?”

He said, “Santana, Jefferson Airplane, Jethro Tull, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, The Who, Crosby Stills Nash and Young.”

I said, “Sounds great.”

He asked, “So, you want to go?”

I asked, “When are you going?”

He said, “Right now.”

I asked, ‘Right now?”

He said, “Right now. Do you want to come?”

I said, “I have to ask my mother first.”

And he wagged his hand dismissively at me, “Ah, you little Momma’s boy, get out of here.”

And that’s how I didn’t go to Woodstock. And, still, I didn’t remember the incident until many, many years later when I was driving home from shul and heard on the radio the Crosby Stills Nash and Young song about going to Woodstock. And as I drove and sang along with the radio—how many times had I heard the song?—for the first time the music evoked in me a jealousy that I hadn’t been born five-or-so years earlier. For, five years of age difference in 1969 was a difference of a generation: eighteen- and nineteen-year-old kids had to deal with the Viet Nam war and the draft as well as all of the country’s wrenching politics and radical cultural shifts—the music, the dress, the sexual revolution, women’s lib. And it produced a maturity in those older baby boomers that us younger ones never quite got. And I was envious of their exposure, their opportunity, their maturity, this great chance at life. I feel like I’ve been playing catch-up ball ever since. And that was compelling to me and I wanted to write about that—about them.