Microdosing Hope
Friday evening in the middle of August, we held our breath and watched the sky, squinting, waiting, wanting it to release its accumulated clutch of murky grey moisture and rain down blessings on our expectant faces.
A good dose of rain in the middle of an Oregon summer is good reason to feel hopeful—like God hasn’t forgotten about us as the hot summer months trudge onward; like we might get lucky and survive one more year without every tree in the Pacific Northwest’s overgrown and unmanaged forests burning all the way down.
Mom hadn’t heard from the doctors yet. She said the radiologist blurted that it looked like cancer while my mother was lying right there on the hard bed in the cold exam room, the ill-fitting hospital gown undoubtedly failing at providing modest coverage.
“Was the radiologist fat?” I asked.
My mom’s face remained pensive.
“Mom, was she fat?”
Now, I am not a sizeist or a fatphobe, but I think it’s worth noting how many healthcare workers are overweight. And while I understand said obesity may be due to the taxing demands of the typical healthcare shift, I still think it sort of devalues, if not entirely undermines, the legitimacy of the industry when someone with a clear case of Type II offers their perspective on any health-related topic. Also, I was trying to make my mom laugh, but she stared straight ahead.
“Radiologist might not know what she’s talking about, is all,” I said, dropping the act but telling myself to remain optimistic.
In a world that’s gone mad, I figured we deserved to cling to delusion, too, if only for a few days.
I called my twenty-something niece and asked her what she was doing that Friday night, and she said, “Nothing,” and I said, “Come to a reading,” and she said, “Okay.”
County Highway—a band of literary rebel rousers and merrymakers—were touring the country all summer, promoting their print newspaper and the authors of their new label, Panamerica. County Highway seemingly represents a variety of apolitical, brutally honest Americans who still value original thought—proof that not everyone in this country has lost their everloving minds.
I’d been planning to see these torchbearers at Tsunami Books in Eugene, but they upgraded their tour at the last minute to include a stop at Grass Roots Bookstore in Corvallis, news I found serendipitous and cause for a tiny hit of joy.
The County Highway crew was running late. (Oregon traffic in the summer is ridiculous; why do people need to haul mobile extensions of their oversized homes containing all their worldly possessions out onto the Interstate and into the great outdoors, anyway?) But my niece and I didn’t care. The pause in scheduled programming gave us time to poke through the shelves, smell the ink on paper, hear the old wood floor creak beneath our feet, and run our hands along the red brick walls, feeling where they still held the heat of the day.
My niece casually mentioned that it was her first time attending a reading—a fact I hadn’t considered possible because the kid is an avid reader. She has a massive brain, a bigger heart, and she can speed-read through ten books without missing a beat, faster than I can finish one. She seemed a little amped up, excited, which made me feel a little excited, too. That’s a nice thing to feel in your forties; it surprises you when the feeling hits, like how you remember that swimming isn’t all that bad once your body is fully submerged, and you realize it’s something you should do more often.
Author Lee Clay Johnson (quintessentially southern with his two first names) and his entourage finally arrived. Johnson perched on a chair behind a microphone, and a group of eager listeners, maybe twelve of us, settled into chairs mere inches before him in the cramped upstairs loft Grass Roots uses for its readings.
Humid air crowded in through the open windows; the muted beginnings of a Friday night in downtown Corvallis floated up from the sidewalks.
Before reading from his new novel, Bloodline, Johnson acknowledged a gentleman at the back of the room with wispy hair that his mother would have probably told him needed a cut back in the ‘70s; he wore wire-framed glasses, a button-down shirt he could’ve gone fishing in, and a khaki vest. He seemed to cling to an old leather briefcase, channeling an era where people had original thoughts, which they printed onto paper, and that simple act carried immense value.
I’d noticed this man walking down the street while the niece and I were circling for parking; he had an aura, like he’d done some cool shit in his life.
Come to find out, the man sitting at the back of the room, clinging to his old leather briefcase, was editor Gary Fisketjon. He’s spent his life’s work influencing our culture, having worked with the likes of Cormac McCarthy, Tobias Wolff, and Bret Easton Ellis; he was Editor and VP of Knopf Publishing until 2019.
Lee Clay Johnson told a story about how, once he’d finished Bloodline (his second novel), he sent the manuscript to a handful of editors at big publishing houses. They all responded positively, saying how much they loved it, but they couldn’t sell it.
Now, when you read the first two sentences of Bloodline, you’re hooked—it’s American literature at its finest; a hell-train ride that’s apt to bounce off the tracks with the turn of a page. But Johnson is a white male, and his beautifully structured, breathtaking story is about a deeply flawed, working-class, poor white family. Apparently, nobody in America is interested in such a read [SARCASM].
Sitting there listening to Johnson tell how difficult it was to find a publisher for his beautiful book, I thought about the website, Manuscript Wishlist, a literary agent directory, and how, when I entered the term “working-class” into its query field in search of representation for my first novel, the search returned six results. When I queried the term “LGBTQ+”, the site returned sixty pages of results, with approximately ten agents listed per page. As I have said before, any author deserves publication if they offer a meaningful, well-written story, labels be damned. But in traditional publishing, it seems labels may matter more than the writing itself …
Anyway.
Johnson knew he couldn’t find any takers within traditional publishing, so he emailed Fisketjon and said, “Gary. Help me.”
Apparently, Fisketjon responded with, “I have an idea,” written in the subject line, and the body of the email was left blank.
In the months since, they launched an independent publishing label, Panamerica. On its website, Panamerica states its mission:
Panamerica is a home for the American voice in the genres of literary fiction and reportage. We publish books that highlight what is most distinctive about American writing, including the mix of high and low subject matter and voices; deadpan and absurdist humor; the tragedies and triumphs of ordinary people living alongside their neighbors; and the ability to invent and inhabit new worlds.
In fiction, Panamerica works with authors who draw on the range and depth of the American literary tradition to be read by present and future generations of Americans.
Sitting between Lee Clay Johnson at the front of the room and Fisketjon at the back, a calm washed over me. If Lee Clay Johnson, with his two first names (who happens to manage an MFA program in Brooklyn for crying out loud), can’t get traditionally published, there’s no way my unpedigreed ass with my debut working-class novel would have ever seen the inside of a big publishing house.
You see, Corporate America’s watering down of the American mind is as prevalent in book publishing as it is in television, music, movies, and any form of mass entertainment. The machine decides what is ‘art,’ controls what is popular, defines what is culture, and spoon feeds it straight into our occupied minds.
But let us remember, this is still America. We were born to challenge our oligarchical overlords.
See my children, resolute children,
By those swarms upon our rear we must never yield or falter,
Ages back in ghostly millions frowning there behind us urging,
Pioneers! O pioneers!-Walt Whitman
I retain great hope in knowing that a few quiet souls spent the summer traversing the country, meeting up with folks in independent bookstores, leading meaningful conversations about freedom of thought, art, and literature, keeping the spark alive.
And for an hour on that humid Friday evening, a dozen humans sat in close quarters, not on our phones, but instead listening, considering, thinking, as other humans shared their thoughts, experiences, and ideas. For the most part, the audience kept their opinions to themselves. There was the one obligatory young man who flexed his literary prowess when framing his long-winded question, which he issued as more of an assertion than inquiry, but that’s to be expected.
Lee Clay Johnson read from his book, and then he spoke about how raw and honest storytelling and American literature might still save us from ourselves. He talked about his and Fisketjon’s desire to change the culture while the room held its breath, nodding along, yes.
With kindness in his eyes and a six-pack of beer at his feet, Lee Clay Johnson told my niece he was honored to be the author at her first reading as he signed her book, and I sensed that he meant it.
We thanked Lee Clay Johnson for visiting Corvallis, and I think he knew our gratitude was sincere, too.
The sky was still trying to decide whether it would rain or not when we stepped out into the evening.
My niece and I strolled down to a little taco joint where we ate and drank margaritas at a wooden table on the sidewalk. Our conversation found its way to the topic of cancer and how long it might take for the final diagnosis to come in.
“Nana is tough,” said my niece.
“She is.”
On the way home, my headlights cutting through the late summer night, I turned off the radio and flipped on my windshield wipers so I could listen to them flap back and forth a couple dozen times as it began to rain.