State of Emergency

Sometimes I hear librarians talk about writers as if they were commodities (do you have the latest Rowling) and publishers as if they were all Voldemorts. Yet behind the handful of media conglomerates wiggles a long, long tail (or tale) of much smaller serials, as you can learn from browsing sites such as Newpages.

Almost thirty years ago, when I was a young woman living on my own in San Francisco, a kind young man named David Hummel befriended me. Last year, a mutual friend contacted me by email to ask if I knew David Hummel and to say that if I was the same Karen Schneider, David had died of AIDS in the 1980s. That knowledge spurred me to write a portrait of my friend, “David, Just as he was,” which was published in the summer 2007 issue of White Crane.

In between idea and publication was a long river of effort. can’t speak for all writers, but here is a very conservative estimate of the effort I expended in producing this personal essay ready for submission to a small literary journal. Reflection, writing: 50-75 hours. Research: 50 hours. Revision: at least 25 hours. Review by trusted colleagues: 25-50 hours. Locating the right venues, submitting the essay: 1 hour (I need to underscore how freakishly little time it took to place this essay, due to a confluence of inadvertent timeliness and good advice). Final pre-publishing revision: 10 hours.

On White Crane’s end, they bear the burden of soliciting writers, editing, layout, publishing, managing subscriptions, struggling with bulk mail, and otherwise maintaining the effort of publishing a journal that at best, might break even for them (and Tin House confirmed for me that their conferences underwrite their journal to a large degree).

A GLBT archive contacted me during the writing process to ask if I knew of any artifacts of David’s life I could share with them. I replied, not to my knowledge. As the words formed in my mouth, I realized that my portrait of David (however modest it might be) was now an artifact — part of the history of David, and San Francisco of the 1970s, and the world before AIDS. By writing the world as it happened, I was contributing to memory work — the building of history through documented truths, which prevents the record from being distorted. (More about this later.)

The net result of the publication process? Income for the publisher: nominal if not negative. Payment for the author: one year’s subscription to White Crane. Chance to participate in building the historical record? Priceless.

I’m not a serials librarian; I don’t even play one on television. But I’m a librarian, which counts for something. I’ve managed tech services, I’ve brokered databases, and I even remember sending serial slips through vacuum tubes at Newark Public Library, and checking the Cardex to see whether a magazine had been checked-in.

I also participate in the serial ecology as a reader — and I think readers’ views matter. In any given moment you might find me reading Atlantic, Vanity Fair, New Yorker, People, The Week, Time, Newsweek, Missouri Review, Poets and Writers, Antioch Review, American Scholar, Sunset, Southern Living, New York Times, Tallahassee Democrat, Slate, Salon, First Monday, White Crane, ZYZZYVA, Creative Nonfiction, Lesbian Connection, Tin House… the beat goes on.

But it is said that the difference between minor and major surgery is whether it’s happening to you, and it is through my experiences as a writer that I began to understand the serial ecology.

The “state of emergency” discussed in this presentation refers to how librarians have yielded the bulk of control over their collections to commercial entities and the implications this has for librarianship as a profession. The paragraphs roughly follow the presentation as I delivered it, but are broken into major sections.

I also call this talk the “Paranoia Presentation.” I give this talk an alternate title for two reasons: the first is to underscore that this is a serious topic — if you aren’t scared, you aren’t paying attention — and also because it’s fun to tweak serials librarians (hah, hah, alternate title!).