Not a link, just a pic, sorry! But hi, what do you think?
I want to launch a multimedia production of my novel in short stories, Tales Told Out of School. These are stories I began in 2014, thinking about all the jobs I’ve worked, from teacher, sportswriter and editor, to dishwasher to waiter to parking lot attendant, fairground game barker, motel maintenance guy, museum tour guide, truck and school bus driver, bicycle assembler, telemarketer, and oriental rug salesman. Oh yeah, stockbroker.
I began with one about a tall, hot-tempered, knife throwing, sous-chef who threatened many people, but who also fainted with a boom on the rubber-matted kitchen floor at the sight of blood coming from nicking his own finger. Big John. He was a scary baby. The walk-in cooler was very good to him.
Next I tapped out, I don’t know, ten or thirteen quick fight scenes from school. I absolutely aimed it like Big John’s flashing knives, for maximum offense. Think of it as a C-section into the Overton Window. I told my writing partner, who was also a teacher, “I am going to blow the doors off what people dream happens in school.” I never went back to the plan about other jobs, like truck driving. I don’t know. I should have kept that up. It’s quaint. I have so many paycheck job experiences.
But I stuck with school sketches. In 2016, Black Lives Matter printed and circulated 60 pages of them at a school board meeting to have me fired. It worked really well for them. I’m an anti-racist, like my fellow 330 million or so Americans, who had walked with them. Here’s a picture I took in 2015.
Here’s another picture I took from a memorial march after the 2016 police killing of Philando Castile.
Anyway.
I haven’t gotten around to reading Infidel or The Satanic Verses, but if you know me, you might know that Tales Told Out Of School were troublesome. They spread due to my being “racially inflammatory” (my lawyer’s words) “culturally appropriating” and sketching some unflattering portraits of urban kids’ lives. So they said.
I actually think the kids represent themselves with total dignity. I can’t think of one in the now-seventy-odd sketches that mocks or belittles urban students. Who would make fun of kids? If they can’t read, or don’t have the best mental health or shining personal hygiene, that’s not funny. Mock actual or fictional children? You have the wrong writer. Why would I do that after working with kids for 20 years? I wouldn’t.
So now, I’m thinking of presenting my book in a new way. It’s meant to follow publication of “It Doesn’t Fit The Narrative,”
my chronicle on the rise of what I call Iron Equity, or equity of outcome, and of low expectations of, especially, black kids in St. Paul schools.
I know full-well how bleak the publishing world is right now for a straight, white, older guy. My intersectional privilege is so high, you would think I have more gold than Smaug, sitting here a pensioner typing on my 2015 iPad, liberated from all that privilege. This will do it, though, my dream-self pronounces. This will crack the Caucasian ceiling.
Maybe what I’d like to know is how any self respecting, pigment-disabled American feels about the strangled publishing world today. Are you deluding yourself, too?
So, what I’ll keep doing is post-production on these excerpts from my novel. I hope to screw my courage tight enough to actually post some of them. Right now, I’m in the critical mode of, “They’re not good enough .. your voice sounds like a leprechaun .. what part of ‘fraud’ don’t you understand?’” You know, the usual.
What is your idea for a “multi-media production” of your stories?