courtesy of  Matthew Swanson


What kind of idiot wants to be a writer? The publishing industry is in tatters, print is dead, and anything longer than 140 characters taxes the attention span. Right? And yet, more books were published last year than ever. Clearly, somebody is still reading the damn things. And writing them: College and university writing programs are full, and there are more of them than ever—some 822 degree-granting creative writing programs for undergraduates and grad students clutter the curricula of American schools, according the Association of Writers & Writing Programs, which supports and monitors the higher-ed lit farms. (In 1975, there were seventy-nine.) More than fourteen thousand students are currently workshopping and sitting through each others’ readings, dreaming of their own enshrinement in the canon, or just a sweet screenplay deal that will let them pay off their student loan.

For Urbanite’s fourth summertime tip o’ the hat to the not-dead-yet art of putting words together, we dipped into this deep pool of emerging talent and asked local collegians to contribute their best fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. We received 174 submissions, a pile of writerly ambition that was ably tackled by editorial intern Cara Selick (herself, appropriately enough, a toiler in a well-known local university writing program) and Managing Editor Marianne Amoss. We could select only a small handful for print publication; click here for more.

To open the package, we also asked the husband-and-wife writer/illustrator duo Matthew Swanson and Robbi Behr to create a story about storytelling. Matthew and Robbi, who teach at Washington College in Chestertown, are the proprietors of a small press called Idiots’ Books, which has produced a series of elegant, whimsical volumes of what they call “satirical illustrated books for adults.” Matthew writes; Robbi draws the pictures. Their work frequently challenges the boundaries of linear storytelling. Their Ten Thousand Stories, for example, is just that: Each page of the illustrated book is divided into four interlocking flaps, so that the reader can assemble umpteen variations. Lately, the couple has been experimenting with what they call “One-Page Wonders”—circular confections of words and images whose elements can be cut, folded, and manipulated by enterprising readers. Get your scissors out: The story on the opposite page should be physically removed from the magazine and folded according to the instructions provided. (For tips, check out the instructional video below.)

After the Idiots submitted their yarn, Urbanite Editor David Dudley talked with Matthew and Robbi about finding new ways to tell stories and the trials of the literary life.


Q: Where did you get the idea of creating a story from a foldable piece of paper that the reader has to cut up and reassemble?

Matthew: We actually took the original template for this from a Cracker Jack prize. It was a picture of a young George Washington and an old George Washington, and it’s exactly like ours, with the cuts and the folds. We said, “That could be made a lot more interesting.” This was three years ago. I’ve had it in my wallet since then. I thought that when the right project comes along, I’ll pull it out. We can’t take credit for the paper-folding concept either—that’s an old trick that people use to make a four-spread book out of a single piece of paper. So we’re introducing complexity into old conventions and pushing the idea of what it means to read by forcing people to make and then engage with the story actively. The combinations of words and images they end up with are beyond the power of the author or the illustrator to imagine. So there’s a degree of authorship in the act of working with the thing.


Q: Back when the Internet was fairly young, there was a lot of hype about “hypertext” novels, with the idea that reading fiction would turn into an interactive experience, with readers clicking and opening up millions of various story options. But hypertext fiction hasn’t exactly taken off. Do readers really want that level of authorship?

Robbi: I do think most people aren’t willing to work that hard as readers—they just want to know what happens. We’ve been conditioned that reading is an absorbative process. In our books, we do leave a lot of space for the reader to figure out a lot of stuff. Not that we’re trying to re-school people on how to read or anything, but we are interested in engaging the reader in ways that they aren’t typically actively engaged.


Q: Your story circles, of course, also have no beginning, middle, or end. The three protagonists in this One-Page Wonder just endure an endless cycle of changing fortune—which is fairly true to the life of
a writer.

Matthew: I think that every piece we do can be fairly described as satire or commentary. And, in general, we try to do it with a degree of benevolence and kindness. We’re hard on our subjects, but we’re not cruel to them. At the same time that we are satirizing the emerging writer here, we’re absolutely pointing the lens at ourselves and our own travails. We’re guilty of all of the crimes that we have accused these three
of committing.


Q: So are you really working on your own ferret-wizard project?

Matthew: I met with an agent in New York a couple of months ago who wants me to create something marketable, so I’m working on a book about a space man fighting a nervous monster, which has some integrity and will certainly be nicely illustrated by Robbi, but which is being written with a slightly more commercial context. I’m going to try and give her something we can live with that she can also sell.


Q: When you’re teaching student writers, do you give them the brutal truth about their dim prospects for actually making a living with this skill? How do you prepare young people for a career in
this business?

Matthew: Our bottom line is to try to teach them to be thinking people. Even though we are helping them with their craft, we care far more about the evolution of thought and the development of concept and the ability to draft an idea and articulate it. That is paramount to us.

Robbi: For the writing to work, it’s not just about spinning an interesting narrative; it’s about getting an idea across in a thoughtful way. In terms of preparing them to be writers, mostly we just tell them it’s work. No matter what you do, if you’re going to be successful at it, you have to work. If you’re not willing to just do the hard work, it’s not going to happen.

Matthew: We also tell them that both of us had to spend a decade mucking through the professional world while developing other skills and creating salaries for ourselves so that we could go off the grid. This myth of just sitting in your apartment and creating art and having it become your career might work for a few really lucky people, but in general making art is kind of a deliberate byproduct of a life plan that includes some other things that you have to do along the way. Hopefully, they are things that you enjoy and have relevance.


Q: As people who hope to make a living off readers and reading, do you fret about the future of the publishing industry? Do you think your students today will grow up to read and buy books?
 
Robbi: The trick is that the classes that we teach are sort of self-selecting, so our students are avid readers. I think we’re also benefiting from the fact that we have pictures with our words. That’s a big trend now for the younger readers.
 
Matthew: They’re much more interested in Neil Gaiman [author of the cult comic book series The Sandman] than they are in John Updike.
 
Robbi: Some haven’t even heard of Updike.
 
Matthew: It’s disconcerting to us how much they love The Sandman. The other thing I’d say is that we can’t predict who our audience is. Because our books have pictures, people say, “Oh, it’s a children’s book.” We suffer from genrelessness. We don’t even really tell stories so much as we advance ideas or stimulate questions. If we tell a story with one of our books, it’s kind of accidental. Nobody really knows what to call us or where to put us. And this interactive stuff we’re doing now is further compounding things. I kind of like that, from a standpoint of art. But it’s frustrating from a commercial standpoint.


CLICK HERE to download the One Page Wonder Story Circles cut out in pdf format.



EMAIL TO EDITOR // SEND TO A FRIEND // PRINT