The project I’m working hardest on finding a place for in the world is Autobiography of a Book.
Autobiography of a Book is the story of a book willing itself into existence. Every word Book presents brings it closer to its dream, its dream, that is, of being what it claims to be, a real, honest-to-goodness book.
Book came to me as a voice and demanded I type as it spoke. I usually scoff at people who claim their writing is dictated by the muse, so I find it funny to be saying something like that myself. But Book is a character, in both senses of the word, and I was ready to listen and to work. Whatever it said, I was happy to go along.
I did wonder during the process if Book would achieve a respectable book length. At almost 44,000 words, I think it did. Short for a novel these days. But then, is it a novel? I struggle with how to characterize Book. There's nothing fictional in it. Everything Book says happened because Book is all language and anything Book says is undeniably Book, even if impossible. Does Book have human arms and legs? Yes, when Book finds it convenient to imagine so; when imagination is defeated, Book borrows the reader’s hand, the reader’s heart.
Book is written as prose, but it does read a bit like poetry. It must be prose poetry!
Also unlike a novel (perhaps like a life?), Book does not have a plot. Book has ideas, actions. Book has thoughts and more thoughts and tries to work them out. Book’s parts often read as essays. Perhaps that’s the way Book would be most properly classified — as a collection of personal essays, the personal essays of someone whose person is no more (somehow more?) than those essays.
Because the essays usually read as separate propositions I am submitting them in small batches to literary magazines and ezines and trying to convince editors that the excerpts can stand alone. I usually send out three pieces at a time. Although I think Book is best understood in more than one dose, I do occasionally send to sites that will only allow one piece at a time.
Except for a live reading series, most of the places that have chosen Book excerpts have so far published all I sent them. I expected more picking and choosing. The editors seem to treat the submission as one unit. As I said, each piece of Book will try out a particular proposition. Yet the pieces don’t always come to the same conclusions. Book changes its mind, attempts to reinvent itself, gets confused, forges forth, raves, whines, whispers, wants not to be too seriously — because Book wants to live a full life.
These online journals have included Book excerpts:
E-ratio
The curated reading series Quiet Lightning also included an excerpt that was previously published in Hawai’i Pacific Review.
fresh.ink has reprinted the chapters that originally appeared at Hawai’i Pacific Review
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How many places have rejected at least one piece of Book? More than 100 ...
I have submissions out to more. I expect more rejections (got another as I prepped this post). Yet I know Book is good, interesting, weird, funny, sad. I know somebody else will decide it fits with what they want. I owe it to Book to find that editor.
When Book is read that is when Book really lives. That is the true life of Autobiography of a Book — a reader making it part of theirs.
Whether an editor accepts or rejects, is delighted or bored, confused or enthralled, so long as they have been a reader, they have given Book life.
Book thanks them, as it thanks every reader, for its life.
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I have been collecting possible epigraphs for Book. I’m hardly the first to engage with a book as a living creature.
[blog post updated 10/29/22]
