Juliet Ulman on Christopher Barzak

Bantam Senior Editor Juliet Ulman acquired Christopher Barzak's One for Sorrow and shepherded it into print.

I really have the wonderful Mumpsimus himself to thank for bringing us together. Matt and I met in person for the first time at the World Fantasy Convention in Madison, Wisconsin, and we were sitting around one night, probably resting from a bout of giggling, talking about short story authors we admired and who I'd been following. I was wishing aloud that some of my favorites had a book in them, and exclaimed in frustration, "Christopher Barzak! Now why hasn't he written a novel!?" To which Matt calmly replied, "But he has." A few minutes later, we'd established that Chris had written a novel, Matt had seen it, and Matt would pass on word that I wanted to take a look. When I got back from the convention, the manuscript was waiting for me.

Reading One for Sorrow for the first time is an experience I will never forget. I couldn't stop myself from describing the sensation to people for months afterwards, even as I realized that, at best, I was coming off as a bit odd. I remember turning page after page, a horrible storm of butterflies building in my stomach with each sentence. As I read, I felt a little lightheaded and sick. I can tell you exactly what it felt like. It felt like when you're in the throes of a tremendous crush, a crush so overwhelming that instead of feeling a little happy and silly in that person's presence, instead you feel so nervous and overtaken with that fluttery adrenalized crush feeling that it's debilitating. That is what it felt like.

As far as the book, I knew we were a match. But what about the author?

I had some editorial concerns, and I wanted to make sure that Chris and I were on the same page as far as what direction to take the book -- so we struck up a correspondence. Before we'd even negotiated the deal, we exchanged several (long!) emails back and forth while he was still in Japan, talking about the book and what we wanted for it, and also just getting to know each other and how our minds worked. We learned we both have a big love for Miyazaki, and especially My Neighbor Totoro; that we both come from very small, rural towns (his in the Midwest, mine in the Northeast) and carry them with us; and that we both believed in the same emotional heart of the book and wanted to travel on the same path. We brainstormed about how to get there, each of us tossing out ideas until typically, we'd figure out what the common core of all of our suggestions were, and find the right way to get to where we were going. It was immediate and exciting, this fizzing creative electricity. If the book and I were a match, it soon became clear to me that I'd gotten very lucky in that Chris and I had a real meeting of minds. No one but Chris could have written that book, and, for me at least, no working partnership but this one would have been quite as instinctive or fluid.

Revising One for Sorrow was a tremendously cooperative, collaborative process, and terrifically rich and rewarding for me as an editor. For some people, this kind of back-and-forth brainstorming and discussion would be done over the phone -- for us, it was the modern equivalent of letters flying back and forth, emails and emails and emails exploring our instinctive responses to the narrative, and our feelings about where it should go. This, truly, is why editors get out of bed in the morning. I really loved every minute of it, the debates, the burbling of ideas, the bright nova of light when someone hit upon something true. Chris is a thoughtful, intuitive writer, and through working on the book together, I think we learned more about each other than we could possibly have done any other way. In the end, I came to this with an electrifying crush on a beautiful, heartbreaking manuscript, and walked away with a rich, creative kinship that will stay with me even longer.

For which I will always, and happily, be in the debt of the Mumpsimus.

Popular posts from this blog

"Stone Animals" by Kelly Link

If Kelly Link isn't the best short story writer in the U.S., then she's the equal of whoever is. I first came to this conclusion a couple of years ago when I read her story "Lull" in Conjunctions: 39 , and I am absolutely certain of it now that I have read "Stone Animals" in Conjunctions: 43 . (Of course, I've also read her collection Stranger Things Happen , but, much as I admire it, nothing in that book is as breathtaking as the stories she has written since it appeared, particularly the two Conjunctions stories.) "Stone Animals" both employs and parodies the basic elements of suburban psychological realism, the sort of scaffolding John Cheever and so many other writers hung their words and laundry on: a family buying a house and moving into it, a father commuting to a desultory job in the city, a pregnant wife who is uncertain about her marriage, suspicions and allegations of adultery, existentially anxious children, a controlling b...
Read more

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

If you expect Never Let Me Go to be about cloning, you will be disappointed. If you expect to be able to read it as a logical science fiction novel, one that extrapolates an alternate world that makes sense, you will find much to grumble about. You will not be satisfied. You will be annoyed, even bored. You will have missed the point. Cloning is a MacGuffin that Kazuo Ishiguro uses to create symbolic situations and characters that coalesce in a powerful vision of life. The symbolism doesn't quite reach the level of allegory, because it's difficult to assign definite meanings to each scene and person, but nonetheless it quickly becomes difficult not to think about certain themes: mortality, love, fate, memory, art, nature. Each paragraph either illustrates or expands one of these themes. In the first half of the book, the ideas the novel personifies do not gain a lot of emotion, but by the second half of the book the characters have become familiar, their personalitie...
Read more

"Loot" by Nadine Gordimer

I've intended to write about Nadine Gordimer's very short story "Loot" for years, ever since I first read it in The New Yorker , and for some reason I actually thought I had written a post here about it.  I recommended the story to a friend a few days ago and intended to include a link to my post about the story when, after a bit of searching, I realized I'd never written the post.  Now I will fix that mistake. From the first sentence, "Loot" is a story about time and history, about legends and imagination.  "Once upon our time," it tells us, there was a Great Event -- the greatest earthquake every recorded, the greatest of all measured "apocalyptic warnings".  Not only is it a Great Event (indeed, the Greatest of such events), but it is ours: we possess it. The second paragraph details the effects of this greatest event of ours.  Most giant earthquakes at sea produce floods and tsunamis, but not ours -- our special earthquake d...
Read more

The Penny Poet of Portsmouth by Katherine Towler

     Dawn again, and I switch off the light. On the table a tattered moth shrugs its wings.      I agree. Nothing is ever quite what we expect it to be. —Robert Dunn Katherine Towler's deeply affecting and thoughtful portrait of Robert Dunn is subtitled "A Memoir of Place, Solitude, and Friendship". It's an accurate label, but one of the things that makes the book such a rewarding reading experience is that it's a memoir of struggles with place, solitude, and friendship — struggles that do not lead to a simple Hallmark card conclusion, but rather something far more complex. This is a story that could have been told superficially, sentimentally, and with cheap "messages" strewn like sugarcubes through its pages. Instead, it is a book that honors mysteries. You are probably not familiar with the poetry of Robert Dunn , nor even his name, unless you happen to live or have lived in or around Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Even then, you may not ...
Read more

Reflections on Samuel Delany's Dark Reflections

At the Los Angeles Review of Books , I have a new essay about Samuel R. Delany's 2007 novel Dark Reflections , which is about to be released in a new and slightly revised edition by Dover Books . Here's a taste: In many ways,  Dark Reflections  is a narrative companion to Delany’s 2006 collection of essays, letters, and interviews,  About Writing . In the introduction to that book, Delany says that its varied texts share common ideas, primary among them ideas about the art of writing fiction, the structure of the writer’s socio-aesthetic world both in the present and past, and “the way literary reputations grow — and how, today, they don’t grow.” The book is mainly, though not exclusively, aimed at aspiring writers. It provides some advice on craft, but it circles back most insistently to questions of value, and especially to questions of the difference between  good writing  and  talented writing  — and what it means, practically and materially, ...
Read more

What Belongs to You by Garth Greenwell

Garth Greenwell's debut novel What Belongs to You  is one of the most celebrated and successful gay novels of 2016. Its success seems to me both odd and gratifying. It is a book that garnered the attention of the literati, and not just the gay literati, though it certainly has that (Edmund White blessed it with a blurb). It received praiseful notice from nearly all the major literary institutions in the U.S. (and elsewhere). It is a remarkable novel, but were I a literary agent or publisher, much of what makes the novel remarkable would have caused me to assume it would not sell very well and would find, at best, a niche audience. (This is perhaps reason #28,302 that it's good I'm neither a publisher nor an agent!) I don't know the sales figures for What Belongs to You , but it hit the LA Times  bestseller list for a couple weeks, got tremendous review coverage, and often seemed to be among the books of the moment — I traveled a lot during 2016, and nearly everyw...
Read more

The Snowtown Murders

The Snowtown Murders  (aka Snowtown ) inevitably draws comparisons to another brutal and disturbing Australian crime movie, Animal Kingdom , with which it shares some general plot elements and stylistic moves (both films were shot by Adam Arkapaw ). But where  Animal Kingdom  shows one young man's struggle to stay innocent in a family of thieves and murderers, Snowtown  depicts the power of a small-time messiah to employ hatred as an excuse for torture and murder. Both films focus their narrative on a quiet (eventually traumatized) adolescent surrounded by monsters, but Animal Kingdom,  for all its virtues, is primarily a drama of demons and angels fighting for a soul, whereas Snowtown  is less allegorical, less schematic, and more deeply disturbing. (A more meaningful comparison than with Animal Kingdom  would be with  Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer .) Though in some ways Snowtown  is the story of how Jamie Vlassakis goes fro...
Read more