Jane Ciabattari: We're Getting More Voices

A deep-dive conversation about books, and how writers can put words to page and help us try to understand the world

Jane Ciabattari, author of the short story collection Stealing the Fire, is a former National Book Critics Circle president (and current NBCC vice president/events), and a member of the Writers Grotto. Her reviews, interviews and cultural criticism have appeared in NPR, BBC Culture, the New York Times Book Review, the Guardian, Bookforum, Paris Review, the Washington Post, Boston Globe, and the Los Angeles Times, among other publications. The National Book Critics Circle awards ceremony takes place March 21 in Manhattan, and will be livestreamed on YouTube. 

Jane and I first met some years ago at a party in San Francisco, co-hosted by NBCC and the ZYZZYVA literary journal. She lives in Northern California, and remains very committed to the culture of books and literature. I wanted to interview her and learn more. 

So Jane, when I met you, I realized that your role in the publishing industry is pretty ubiquitous. You’re here, you’re there, in New York, on the West Coast, you’ve published books. You’ve taught at Columbia and NYU. Your cultural criticism appears everywhere, and you support a continual stream of new books and authors on social media. I follow your column in Lit Hub. And we even did a flash fiction reading together last month. So I did a little research and I found out that you grew up in a small town in Kansas, is this correct?

It was Emporia, Kansas. Maybe 30,000. There was a local college, which became a university while I was there. I was a fifth-generation Kansan descended from an abolitionist, who left Kentucky to try to help make Kansas a free state during the pre-Civil War movement. Emporia Gazette is where I started writing, when I was 14. It was a Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper founded by William Allen White, who was a kind of big deal in his time. I taught myself how to type. I started writing this column for the Gazette. And I discovered that I was paid by the inch. So I wrote as long as I could. You know, you learn those things. So I’ve been meeting deadlines ever since. I had a smart older brother and sister who said, you’ve got to get out of Kansas. I kind of knew that it was boring. I like action. 

That is the terrain of small-town life. You’re looking out the window, going, why is the world moving so fast?

Yeah, I just needed to get out. My older brother got a national merit scholarship to Harvard, so I got a national merit scholarship to Stanford and just moved along very fast. I was studying creative writing at Stanford with Nancy Packer and Blair Fuller, and enjoying myself there. And then I met my darling on a blind date [novelist Mark Ciabattari]. We got married my sophomore year. Our son was born right before my senior year. 

Was there any pixie dust in the air remaining from the students who had been there before, like Tom McGuane, Ken Kesey, Philip Levine, Robert Stone, Larry McMurtry?

No, not really. Not for a girl. It was very much a guy sort of thing. It was hard for girls. I arrived, and they started asking me to be hostess at all the fraternity parties. I went, well, that’s interesting. Nancy Packer was the one who gave me attention, and she was marvelous. She was a very wonderful writer and professor, and helped me believe that I could do something with my writing of fiction. I mean, it’s remarkable when I think back on it. Because it was really difficult for girls.

So after Stanford I ended up going to graduate school at San Francisco State, while I was working full-time as a managing editor at Sunday Magazine in San Francisco. I was writing short stories that were ending up published for money, which was really thrilling because I’m my family’s major breadwinner. And then I got my master’s thesis [a novel called Meeting Deadlines] condensed in Redbook magazine, which used to publish a condensed novel every month, including Toni Morrison’s Sula. And it was for a lot of money. I think it was like 10 grand or something. 

Compared to today, the economics of this is insane. I interviewed Tom McGuane once, and he told me that one magazine paid him six grand per story, for six stories a year. You could hear the audience gasp. 

It was huge. Harold Hayes at Esquire believed in good literature. Anne Mollegen Smith at Redbook believed in good literature. And they paid money. They convinced the advertisers that if you ran fiction, people would keep reading and jump to the back and follow it, and you could have your ads alongside all the smaller ads, and you get tons of exposure that way. 

Oh man. That’s such an outdated way of thinking. 

I know, imagine that. So I wrote about the coming of cold type, and cold type was essentially computerizing the printing process, right? And so that’s what my novel/thesis was about. I ended up having some writers’ colony visits. I went to MacDowell, I went to the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. I won a couple of small literary awards. I was a finalist for the Iowa Short Fiction Prize for my first short story collection. And I was too naive to realize that I could submit more than once.

In this era, I’m imagining that the sort of retreat fellowship/MFA landscape was much smaller than it is now. 

Absolutely. I think the first time I went to MacDowell, I ran into Meg Wolitzer, and Terry McMillan. 

When I came up as a writer in the 90s, that fellowship world seemed to be kind of secret. People didn’t really talk about it. People weren’t yet posting all of their dinner photos from writing retreats on Facebook. You sort of had to be in the know to navigate that world, and realize the opportunities available. 

What you’re making me realize is the first time I went to a writer’s conference, it was to the Community of Writers. And it was because I got a scholarship to go up there. I wrote Stealing the Fire, the story that is the title story to my collection, while I was up there on that fellowship. And I’ve gone back from time to time as a teacher. I nominated Oakley Hall [author and co-founder of Community of Writers] for an award from Poets & Writers, for literary cultural power in the world. After all he’d done, he deserved it. I always felt like those folks back in the New York City area don’t tend to look west. 

So let’s talk about Amy Tan for a bit. You met her at Community of Writers, when she was working on a manuscript that became The Joy Luck Club. The novel came out in 1989, and was a big success, as well as the film version in 1993.

That was a huge book and a film deal, and it changed literature in many ways. It was linked stories, and it just hit a buzz. But also, white readers were drawn into it. Like early Terry McMillan books, which were so human and gave such a wonderful experience from the female point of view. But the other thing that was going on, was that writers were playing around with genre. That was a huge thing. Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn, which came out in 1999, was a huge success. He was a Brooklyn guy, but he spent a lot of time in Berkeley, as you may know. And Philip K. Dick is a big part of his history, understanding and caring for the work of Philip K. Dick, and working at bookstores in Berkeley. 

We haven’t talked about the thing that came along, that we called the dot-com boom, with The Well and Salon and Craigslist and Wired. Who remembers Y2K, and life before Google and Google Earth and Google Maps? And of course, Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and iPhones and all the rest. Think about the publications that are dwindling. Everything’s online. It’s not the same. The ways in which people used to be compensated have changed hugely. And I don’t even want to talk about the potential for AI to change the way people are writing. 

It was very weird when that first wave of digital culture hit the publishing industry. Late ’90s, early 2000s. People were able, very briefly, to make a good living. I remember going to writer parties here in San Francisco, and I met someone who had a gig writing for pampers.com. Content for a diaper website. Some people I knew wrote reviews of wine websites for another website, wine.com. And they were making $60,000 a year. When were the flush times for you as a journalist?

I had a job at Parade magazine. It had 80 million readers. I always said it had 80 million readers, none of whom I knew. 

For people who don’t know, Parade was a magazine inserted in Sunday newspapers throughout the United States. 

They paid for me to go everywhere. I was out of the country reporting from places like China, Cuba, Morocco, covering NATO.  It was a weekly column covering international affairs, Washington politics, and the movies. I covered the Golden Globes. I covered all the conventions. I covered the UN. I was on the contributing editor list, along with people like Gail Sheehy and Dotson Rader.

And at what point did you begin writing about books and authors?

I started writing reviews in 2005 or so, because I was in an accident and I had to lie around for about a year, and I had to stop working. So I started reviewing for Steve Wasserman at the Los Angeles Times, who I had known in New York. My first review was of an Alice Munro book, it was a cover story, and then it went on the inside for a page. And he sent me this check. And I’m going, where’s the other zero? You know, what’s going on? He said, well, it’s probably enough to buy you a nice lunch, if you don’t have wine. 

But if you wanted, you could self-syndicate and publish all around other places. John Freeman, who I know through the National Book Critics Circle, a very big literary figure, he used to self-syndicate all around the world. That’s gone now. 

By self-syndicate, I’m guessing you mean you would receive a galley of an upcoming book in the mail. You’d read it and write up a review. And then you’d quickly print out 15, 20 copies, whatever it was, stuff the envelopes, go to the post office, buy stamps, mail them to all of these different outlets, and then read another book and do it again next week. That’s crazy. 

Oh, yeah, yeah. The whole thing. It’s work. If you were to review for the Los Angeles Times or The New York Times, it would appear only in that city. You got to know the book editors at the other newspapers. The Sarasota, Florida newspaper, whatever it was. It would be lucky if the newspaper would send you a print copy. But that was enough to piece it together back in those days. 

So you’ve been able to observe the book industry for a while. You’ve watched the peaks and valleys, and zones of interest gain popularity, and then they’re replaced by something else. Describe how this industry has changed over time. 

I think the last several years have changed publishing enormously. I wrote a column for BBC Culture for many years. And one of the things I wrote about is how the internet changed literature. For instance, Jennifer Egan tweeting a short story. I also did a monthly column that was books to look for. And because BBC Culture is global, I was always looking at work in translation and work from other countries. I have an affinity for exploration and a curiosity about cultures. Plus a lot of other elements of my background lead me to be a person who volunteers to serve, as I have on many boards. And also how to look for equity and justice in the world, which is complicated and not easy to do. 

One of the things is that we’re getting more voices. There were a few voices that weren’t white voices, but they were mainly white male. And then there was an opening out toward more female voices, which comes and goes, by the way. The enormously great Toni Morrison and the enormously great late Scott Momaday, and others who were the giants who preceded us, opened doors in ways that were really important.

Toni Morrison won the National Book Critics Circle Lifetime Achievement Award, for instance. I remember writing my nomination for her, and it wasn’t just that Nobel Prize-winning book, it was also her work as a teacher, as an editor, as a cultural leader, as a memoirist. I remember being at an AWP and hearing her give a speech, and I was in a spillover room. It was so crowded, I was taking notes, standing up. And I wrote out things and pasted them around my writer’s room at home because she just was so inspiring, remarkable. I get the chills. 

I look at people who are the leaders, who helped get us through a door, or open the door further. And I don’t think it’s people in the business world. I think it’s people who are readers, and other writers, and book critics who look at work and say, this is remarkable. When I look back at the National Book Critics Circle, one of the things about this organization, it’s kind of a maverick, which is why I love it. It has no money. It is 50 years old this year, and we are all volunteers, no office, no staff, a 24-member board does it all. 

And we have been way in advance in many cases. We gave Toni Morrison our fiction award early in her career, Louise Erdrich and Amy Tan also got best-book-of-the-year fiction for early work, we gave Borges an award. Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives. And it just goes on and on. That kind of fits into my own tendencies, appreciating when a book is making new forms. And that’s what I've been seeing in recent years. We have new forms being created as we breathe right now. And the forms recognize all the things that are going on. We’ve got climate change. We’ve got incredible conflicts around the globe. We have the rise of fascism, racism, gun violence. We have all these things happening. And writers can put words to page and help us try to understand that. 

Not a lot of book critics are also published authors. There are some who trade in both, but I want to understand how you can split your brain to do this. How can you write when you also have a critical brain? Or how can you criticize an author’s work when you also have toiled to write a book? How does that duality work in your mind?

I was sort of born to be an appreciator. I’m not as big on being negative about people’s work. It’s partly because I was an editor early on. I’m more interested in showing how something’s working, if it is working, and appreciating that. So that’s not a problem for me. 

And when you’re writing criticism, you have more empathy for the writer because you also understand that perspective? 

Yeah. But I also have that journalist cynicism towards something that’s been overhyped, and it’s not as good as it should be. 

When I started working with authors in translation for Litquake, I realized that getting published in the United States is very different than it is in Brazil, Switzerland, France, South Korea. It just opened my eyes to what the possibility of books can be. I once attended a book festival in downtown Buenos Aires, and I counted seven bookshops in one block. And it almost kind of makes you cry because the appreciation is just so different here in America. Can you talk about what you’ve noticed over time in these differences between cultures? 

Well, I think there are people living in the United States right now who are breaking into new forms and are combining, in some cases, archival story approaches from their own heritage, and bringing it into looking around where we are in this land and making things exciting. It’s quite interesting. Teju Cole’s first novel was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in fiction, when nobody knew who he was. He was Nigerian and he lived in various places, and he was very interested in photography. He came to New York, and his habit was to wander around at night and then he would look around. And it became what people now call auto-fiction, but he was doing it fairly early on. Like a lot of people who were raised outside of the United States, he wasn’t limited to the idea that you could only be one thing. So he could be a writer, and he could be a specialist in other things, and he could do photography and do photography criticism.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is another one. I was at a point where I was selecting the three future female leaders of Africa with an NEH grant. And she was one of them. And I remember going down to interview her at Princeton when she was about to begin work on a book about the Biafran War, which her father had been involved in and her family was affected by. Mark and I had a friend who was Nigerian, a playwright, who alas, went back and died in the Biafran War. So it was one of those moments of hoping that she would do something interesting. And then when that book came out, Half of a Yellow Sun. it was smashing, just amazing. So I’ve been sort of tracking her ever since.

And I keep thinking someone like Chimamanda has grown up in Nigeria, has lived in England, lives here in the United States. She’s back and forth. She’s got that combination of cultural background and storytelling, it’s genius informed by so many different environments. But I think we have the potential, any of us who are writers, to do that, if we open our minds and pay attention.

Scott Momaday is another one. And Deborah Miranda, Bad Indians. What an interesting combination. It’s these collages or mosaics that suddenly make you think, wait a minute, it isn’t only one kind of writing. It’s not just postmodernism or realism. You don’t have to be stuck in your literary critical academic background and stay there. Anybody who’s writing today has the possibility to write in new ways and new forms and access new voices. 

So what book was your touchstone when you were very young? Where you thought, maybe I would like to try to write?

I think a lot of people are drawn to Virginia Woolf’s work. There are certain things that she was doing that reflect the way the mind works, that keep us from being forced into the box of time, to open it up in ways. I just talked to Martin MacInnis, who’s a Scottish writer. He’s author of a Booker long-listed book called In Ascension. And he was very influenced by Virginia Woolf. He’s writing what might be considered science fiction, about a woman who becomes a marine microbiologist and ends up on a space mission.

That’s like realism now. 

Yeah, I know. I didn’t think of it as sci-fi. I think of him as a writer, and so do the Booker people now, obviously. I’ve always been impressed by Margaret Atwood’s work. I think she’s incredibly responsive to the world around us. And she’s picked up and been able to write in interesting ways about social and political movements. So I’m a big fan of hers. 

So why flash fiction? The form is so distinct. It’s to be consumed in a single sitting or heard out loud in a single sitting. It’s a very different style of writing. What attracted you to this and why do you advocate it so much? 

It’s not a novel. Not a novel. I learned from Meg Pokrass, a fellow co-founder of the Flash Fiction Collective with Grant Faulkner, you can work on something that takes some outside constraints, that will make it almost like a puzzle. I began to write 100-word stories. And I was going, this is thrilling. You can finish something. And they were published and anthologized. There’s something about it that’s really exciting. We can have a reading, and eight people read, and you’re still out in an hour, but you’ve gotten all this input. 

Yeah. And it’s nothing extra, right? There’s kind of a minimalism to it. In a way, it’s all about the moment. It isn’t about the book deal.

Exactly. Not a novel, not about the book deal. 

Wow. Well, I feel like we could go on and on and on. But thank you so much, Jane, for your time. 

Thanks, Jack.