Upper Valley authors wade into battle of ideas and morality

Hartland author Jo Knowles has published 10 books for middle-grade readers since 2007. Half of them have found their way onto lists of banned books.

It’s an ongoing issue that seems only to be getting worse. State legislatures, including New Hampshire’s, are enabling book bans on a wider scale.

Bans make it harder for an author like Knowles to make a living. Her books aren’t particularly controversial, but deal frankly with real problems young people face.

“They can just say ‘controversial content’ and they don’t even have to define it,” Knowles, 54, said in an interview.

Books are always released into an ongoing battle of ideas and morality. That battle seems especially pitched right now, under a regime in Washington that’s pushing for books to be banned and has fired the Librarian of Congress. At the same time, The Atlantic magazine reported recently that even students at top colleges not only aren’t reading books, but don’t really know how. Modern technology seems all-consuming, pushing books to the side.

But none of this is stopping publishers from releasing new books, and writers still have a strong influence on the wider culture. Locally, Bookstock, the annual literary festival in Woodstock, is taking place this weekend with a varied slate of author events and a huge used book sale, and Norwich Bookstore and other outlets are holding a heavy slate of readings from new books throughout the month.

Writing is more than a cottage industry in the Upper Valley. In interviews, a range of authors said that while they’re unnerved by how books are being treated, they’re still putting words on the page.

Books and technology

Among the many ways technology has changed how writers work, artifical intelligence is the most unsettling, Lyme author L. Annette Binder said.

“It poses a real sort of existential threat to writing,” Binder said in a phone interview.

She was slated to read from her new memoir, “Child of Earth and Starry Heaven,” about her search for meaning as her mother declined into dementia, on Friday evening at Bookstock.

Her two previous books, both works of fiction, “have been fed to AI,” she said, as has a more recent short story. The Authors Guild, a union representing writers, is suing OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT and other AI tools that generate writing based on works that have been scanned, on the ground that it used published works without permission. (Hanover author Jodi Picoult is among the named plaintiffs in the class action lawsuit, filed in September 2023.)

Technology, particularly the internet, can help writers, but it’s a mixed blessing.

“In some ways, I think the moving of a lot of book publicity and promotion online has been very democratizing,” said Sarah Stewart Taylor, a crime fiction author based in Hartland whose upcoming mystery, “Hunter’s Heart Ridge,” comes out in August. 

When Taylor’s first book, “O’ Artful Death” was published in 2003, attending readings at bookstores was essentially her only means of promotion.

“There were things about that that were fun, but without a huge amount of tour budget … there were places I just couldn’t go,” she said. Now, authors can speak at events around the world via Zoom.

“That was something good that came out of the pandemic,” Taylor said.

Social media platforms such as TikTok and Instagram have also given authors new avenues to publicize their work directly to readers, rather than going through a publisher or media outlet.

In some cases, they’ve even given books a new lease on life.

“It used to be that a book had a life and it died, and every once in a while a book would have a second life for a reason, but that is so common now,” said romance author Sarina Bowen, whose new thriller “Dying to Meet You” hit stores earlier this week. Sarina Bowen is the author’s pen name. 

Adam Blue, a Cornish-based artist and writer who recently published his 12th book, and first novel, “And It All Makes Sense in the End,” self-publishes his work, mainly because he’s not a great fit for the traditional publishing business. The internet is essential to getting his books in front of readers.

“I know that my creative production is esoteric, and I am constantly trying to change,” Blue, 53, said. “What is most attractive to a publisher is continuity.”

Thanks to the web, he sells more internationally than in the U.S. One of his books, “An Organic Palette,” is big in Japan.

He wrote his novel to fit what might be called the internet attention span, “as tight as possible.”

But publicizing work online isn’t something every writer relishes, especially when it becomes mandatory.

“You have to do it just to be on people’s radar and to show your publisher that you care and that you’re trying. It’s almost like a price you pay to be in the publishing world,” Taylor said.

Publishers want to know how many social media followers a writer has before accepting a book, Jay Heinrichs, an Orange, N.H., author, said.

“There’s almost less interest in the topic of the book than in the audience you can bring,” he said.

Heinrichs is publishing a Substack newsletter and posting it to social media to attract readers as he nears the July 15 publication date of “Aristotle’s Guide to Self-Persuasion,” his latest foray into classical rhetoric, a subject he’s been writing about for two decades.

As communities like BookTok, a subculture of TikTok focused on book recommendations, have become mainstream, authors have been forced to appeal to the new arbiters of taste: influencers.

When Bowen had a new book out, it used to be that her publisher, Harper Collins, would send it to a list of media outlets for review. That still happens, but now Harper also has a list of influencers who can “raise their hand” to talk about Bowen’s book on their platforms.

The TikTok algorithm is also a fickle beast. For a lucky few, it can be the ticket to mainstream success, but for most, it’s just a headache.

“The gatekeeping is different, but from where I stand, it doesn’t feel more democratic, because sometimes the things that BookTok grabs onto and holds onto feel just as random as the old gatekeeping system did,” Bowen said.

Publishing is still strong

The book business itself is “quite healthy,” with strong sales, Priscilla Painton, editor-in-chief at Simon & Schuster and a Woodstock resident since 2020, said. Readers, many of them younger, are sinking their attention into romantasy novels, a genre that barely had a name a few years ago.

Book bans that affect public and school libraries are still a problem, said Painton, who’s vice chair of the Bookstock board. But they have also mobilized writers, librarians, publishers and readers to push back.

“In some cases, it has brought some urgent and illuminating attention to books that are important,” she said, adding that such books have a message that runs counter to the nature of banning books.

Bookstock includes a Saturday night screening of “American Fiction,” a film that satirizes the publishing industry’s struggles to publish a variety of voices. “What it shows is that the publishing industry is still overwhelmingly white,” Painton said. A Sunday panel discussion of publishers addresses the question of “Who gets to decide your story?”

In 2008, White River Junction poet and editor April Ossmann left her position as executive director at Alice James Books, a publishing house based in New Gloucester, Maine, to start her own consulting business for writers. A self-described “problem solver,” she enjoys helping authors get their work out to the public. She recently published a new collection of her own, “WE.”

She said it wouldn’t surprise her if soon there’s a rebellion against “the constant demand on our time and attention.”

“I think reading might be seen as one of the healthy, meditative alternatives,” she said.

All books are now considered “content,” Heinrichs said. Once scarce, content is now unimaginably plentiful, so books also compete with TikTok and YouTube. Evaluation is upside down.

“The more the value of content goes down, the more the value of attention goes up,” Heinrichs said. If a writer can get someone to read an entire book and then discuss it, that’s “an astronomical amount of time” in the current economy. The task then is to hold and monetize that attention.

That’s no easy feat. His first book, 2007’s “Thank You for Arguing,” became a rhetoric textbook and Heinrichs would talk to high school and college classes. Back then, students would have read the entire book. “That’s rare now,” he said.

The Atlantic’s story, “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books,” published in October, details this phenomenon. It’s a critical issue. Students who learn to read books, Heinrichs said, “are the ones who are going to be able to deal with our future robot overlords.”

Reasons to keep writing

While authors acknowledge that books are being threatened, they still believe in the value of their work, and they plan to keep at it.

“For those of us who are lucky enough to have this as our job, there’s something timeless about using (our) imagination to create a fictional world that people still somehow find and enjoy and that enters their imagination in turn,” Taylor said.

After all, for many authors, the impulse to write doesn’t just come from a desire to connect with an audience.

“You write it for yourself, but you publish for other people,” Ossmann said.

In the opening paragraphs of “You Can Never Die,” a graphic memoir by Harry Bliss that weaves together vignettes from his life with reflections on the grief he felt as an adult after the death of his dog, Penny, Bliss writes that his greatest hope for the book was to establish intimacy with the reader.

But more than that, the book “was for me,” he said in an interview. “It was the thing I did for me.”

Geoffrey Douglas, an author based in West Lebanon, has been waiting half his life to craft a story based on his eight-year tenure as an editor and publisher of an investigative weekly that reported on Atlantic City’s crime-ridden casinos of the ’80s. Those years took a lot out of him. 

“I hadn’t bargained on that kind of soul digging,” he said. “It was just awful.”

Years ago, he pitched the idea to publishers, but got no takers. In need of income, Douglas pivoted to nonfiction. His third book, “The Game of Their Lives,” about the team of underdogs who led the U.S to victory against England in a World Cup match in 1950, was adapted into a major motion picture in 2005.

He published two more books after that, but his time in Atlantic City still haunted him.

About six years ago, he took another stab at that first novel. 

“I just needed to write it,” said Douglas, now 80.

Without the same financial burdens as when he was younger, he was able to sign with Greenleaf, an independent publisher that charges a fee upfront.

“Love in a Dark Place” came out on Tuesday.

Lyme novelist W.D. Wetherell and Newbury, Vt., poet Sydney Lea are among the deans of the Upper Valley literary community. Not surprisingly, they take the long view.

“Writers and book lovers have almost always thought that books were on their last legs,” Wetherell said, then cited examples from Herman Melville, Andre Gide and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

There are ample reasons for both pessimism and optimism, he said. Pessimism: Kids get phones and video games in middle school and stop reading. Optimism: Books are being banned, so they must have great power.

Wetherell, 76, is writing a newsletter these days, similar to the columns about writers and writing that he wrote for the Valley News from 2015 to 2019. He wrote in November about whether he should listen to the signals he’s been getting from the publishing industry to stop writing. “Message received,” he wrote. “Thanks publishing industry, thanks modern world. But I don’t think I’ll listen to you quite yet.”

Like Wetherell, Lea, 82, is still writing. A new and selected poems is due out next year. He is no stranger to how the internet has changed how books are published, but it doesn’t matter. There will always be readers, even if their numbers diminish.

The future of poetry publication is probably online, he said. He received more feedback from a poem published in Agni, an online journal put out by Boston University, than anything he’d put out in print, he said.

But he expects books to survive. “I’m no seer,” Lea said. “I’m just assuming there will be perhaps a diminishing number of people who will want to hold a book in their hand.”

For information about Bookstock, go to bookstockvt.org. For information about readings at Norwich Bookstore, go to norwichbookstore.com.

Marion Umpleby can be reached at mumpleby@vnews.com or 603-727-3306. Alex Hanson can be reached at ahanson@vnews.com or 603-727-3207.