mcsweeney’s q&a

When we decided to launch audiobooks last year, we immediately began brainstorming how to make them more “eMusic,” if you will. Discovery, independence, prestige — these are the qualities that we prize on the music side. How could we maintain those same characteristics with books as well? One name kept coming up: McSweeney’s, the incomparably great and idiosyncratic publishing collective founded by Dave Eggers that churns out great words and ideas on its website, in its quarterly literary journal, in its magazine The Believer and in its oddball DVD series Wholphin. If anyone in the literary world embodies independence, it’s these guys.

Fortunately for everyone, they were up for it. McSweeney’s Notes From the Field, posted just this morning, is the first of four audio introductions to the McSweeney’s world, each built around some loosely cohesive theme, this inaugural collection tackling the notion of danger in a number of different permutations. I recently chatted with McSweeney’s publisher Eli Horowitz to discuss the nature of McSweeney’s, plans for future installments and the peculiar recording process that lead to volume one of this series. Read it below to fully understand just how special and unique this project is.

PS: For a fuller explanation of this collection, check out this PDF.

PPS: For a big, gorgeous image of the awesome artwork, click here.

YS: Can you explain the mission of McSweeney’s and what it is?

EH: We’re an independent publishing company based in San Francisco. I guess we’re ten years old now. We do this quarterly journal, we do a monthly magazine called The Believer, we do books — all sorts of books, like novels, art books, humor, all sorts of things — and now we have this DVD project Wholphin, a quarterly. But the stuff we are doing now for eMusic is all from our sorta flagship publication, the Quarterly. That’s short stories and other things of different shapes and sizes.

YS: Your phone is cutting out…

EH: Oh, I’m pacing. Is this better?

YS: That is better.

EH: I’m nervous. Sorry for that.

YS: Not at all. How do you define the difference between being an indie publisher and one of the big publishers?

EH: No one here, basically, has ever been a part of a big publisher. I came to this job as a volunteer carpenter helping to build our tutoring center. I had never done this before, and everyone else here was basically an intern that stuck around. So more than being consciously different it’s more that we’re blissfully ignorant of how things are done. Sometimes we make things more difficult for ourselves due to that, because we’re trying to reinvent the wheel, but a lot of times it’s freeing because we can approach things in a new way and not have to think about the consequences or the precedents. The main thing is a sense of spontaneity and possibility and wanting to challenge ourselves. And also because it’s such a smaller audience, we can feel a collective enterprise. Not just in the office, but with all our readers as well.

YS: Do you have an image of who your audience is?

EH: They’re in their basement, they’re wearing nylon shorts and no shirt… No. I like not having a picture. I hope it’s a variety of people, and to the extent that it might fit into a demographic, I prevent my mind from thinking like that.

YS: What is your role there?

EH: I was Managing Editor, and now I guess I’m Publisher. But those are just names that mean a mix of things. I do some editing and some design — it’s often that the same people who edit something will design that project and also work with the printer, lay out the cover. Taking a project from start to finish: how many to print, how to get it out into the world, how to make people care about it. So there’s really a little of all of that. That’s what being a publisher means — all of that plus spreadsheets.

YS: How has your carpentry experience helped?

EH: The lesson is: if you don’t know how to do something, just try to do it anyway. [Laughs] And some things are not as hard as they look. I’m better at publishing than I am at carpentry, which is not to say I am so great at publishing, but I was definitely not very good at carpentry. But there’s definitely that same sort of spirit. But one thing that surprised me when I started building things was the way it seems like this really technical, precise operation when you don’t know what you are doing, but when you get in there you realize that so much of it is, ‘Oh, put a two by four there,’ or ‘Just bang that with a hammer ’til it bends the way you want it to.’ That’s how it works here. No one has been trained as to how to do things.

YS: Is any of the office furniture stuff that you have built?

EH: Hang on, lemme look around. No, no way. There’s no way it would have survived this long. There’s some things I found on the street. When I was doing that stuff it was for the pirate shop. The other part of the whole operation are these tutoring centers, like 826 Valencia, that have spread around the country. Ten cities now. And in the front of each one of those tutoring centers we have a store — partly to help fundraise for the center and partly to help bring in the community.

YS: In Brooklyn you have the superhero shop.

EH: Exactly. So we have the pirate supply shop in San Francisco. So originally when I started it was to help that store get ready. But basically by now, or within a matter of months, every remnant of what I had touched had been done better by someone else as the store got its feet on the ground, and when actually skilled people got involved, they were able to upgrade all of my work. But there is a fish tank prominently displayed, a kind of fish theatre, with a fabric canopy and movie theatre seats so you can watch the fish. Well, I bought that fish tank. You can’t take that away from me. [Laughs]

YS: When you have more name writers come through — the Denis Johnsons, etc — do you get any sense that they view working with McSweeney’s different from working with other publishers? Is there some level of relief to be working someplace so different?

EH: Definitely. Some of them are just excited to be involved in our more elaborate concoctions — when we do stranger things with the physical format or something like that. That’s a novelty that they might not get elsewhere. Also that collective spirit that I was talking about: sometimes they actually enjoy being one of eleven stories, four of them by first-timers, six of them by nobodies and then them. It’s a fun hodgepodge and they enjoy the experience. And also just that they’re dealing with the same person throughout: it’s not like one person acquires the story, one person edits the story, someone else lays it out in a way that has no sensitivity to the story itself. It’s one person who is accountable to the writer for the whole time, which makes it easygoing and us more responsive. So yeah, unless we somehow have a lot of typos…

YS: I’ve been a reader and subscriber since the beginning, and at the beginning it seemed to be trading on names, getting name writers to do oddball pieces to build a reputation. But now it seems like McSweeney’s itself is the name and you could do whatever you wanted, regardless of who’s on the contributors page.

EH: If there was an issue ready and there was no one that any one had ever heard of in there, we wouldn’t wait for a name to come along. Just whatever happens, happens. But definitely. Just being open to whoever is definitely a goal and our reason for existing. There’s a silly thing that happens where people reinforce the easy boundaries — someone needs to have an agent or someone needs to have an MFA or now someone needs to have gone to a particular MFA —

YS: These barriers that people put up.

EH: It’s one thing that they exist at all, which is bad enough. But when they’re accidentally reinforced by the people… What am I trying to say here? It’s like how the whole marketplace needs to care a little bit about blurbs because the blurbs are going to help sell the book to some consumer out wherever. But when it’s just some lonely literary journal editor sitting in his room — like we all are — it seems a terrible thing…

YS: It has to be a conscious effort and decision to be open, because a lot of our screening shortcuts can be useful.

EH: Right, but what we try to do is have it really woven into our system, where everything we get just goes into the pile and that’s all we have to do and then you have to read everything. So as long as you are willing to read everything in the pile, and put everything in the same pile, then it will happen. The stories are just as good. The best writers write plenty of mediocre stories, and plenty of people who probably won’t go on to have great careers can still write a pretty terrific story.

YS: What’s the volume of submissions?

EH: Something like 7,000 a year. That’s the number I say and it might be true… Somewhere in that ballpark. We’ll end up publishing maybe 40 or so a year. As long as we’re willing to look at a bunch, then it just naturally happens. We don’t have to go seeking people, because there are so many people who want to be published, and so many people writing stories and writing books and as long as we keep a system that forces us to be open to that, that forces us to be exposed to that, then that’s naturally going to happen. There’s just going to be a whole range of voices. And even when we have the bigger people, those are not folks who we solicit.

YS: They go in the pile just like the rest?

EH: Yeah. Depending on who it is we might move it lightly up in the pile just so that we can talk to them before they send it elsewhere.

YS: Are you a writer?

EH: No. Sometimes we have a little hole that needs to be filled so I’ll do a little thing for The Believer. None of this was ever… I read books before this job and I went to the library a lot, but it was never a goal or anything.

YS: The Believer has had a pretty significant music focus, and I’m curious about McSweeney’s’ relationship to music, if there is one. Is there an office stereo that’s always playing something?

EH: It’s too controversial. What’s kept it at the somewhat limited level that it’s at is that somehow we can all come close to agreeing on books and stories, but if we ever went too far musically the tastes diverge too much.

YS: In the office you mean?

EH: In the office. We would have a tough time…

YS: It’s a headphones office, then.

EH: Yeah, it’s definitely a headphones office. There’s overlap, there’s sharing.

YS: What about you personally?

EH: I’ve been listening to the new Silver Jews album that’s coming out in a couple of months. I was listening to that this morning.

YS: Has [Silver Jew mainman] David Berman ever done anything for McSweeney’s?

EH: He did some poems for The Believer in the early days. I don’t know how many poems he’s still writing these days, but we’ve been talking about doing something for our next music issue, which will be out in July. So Silver Jews and Sam Cooke. Those are the two poles for me.

YS: So jumping into McSweeney’s Notes from the Field, why did you pick these five stories?

EH: The idea is to have four themed collections, and this one is danger. That’s the word for this one. Stories with physical action and fraught tension and actual violent people or animals involved. There’s no real need for this one to be first. We’re still learning about this audio stuff. Everything we do we do it before we understand it and that’s how we start to understand it.

YS: Well what did you learn from this?

EH: We learned that we really need to tell the writers not to say their “p’s” too loudly. A lot of this one was just figuring out what kind of mic was good enough. It was a pretty encouraging experience technically. We got this mic for $100 off the internet and sent it around to the people wherever they were and they recorded it directly into their computers using Garageband or whatever. We would do touch-ups back here.

YS: They all shared the same mic?

EH: Everyone except one.

YS: Jessica Anthony, who had the studio in her home.

EH: Yeah, exactly.

YS: I love the idea of everyone using the same microphone.

EH: We mail it around. Maybe we’ll try and make that required, they can carve their initials into the mic stand. Part of the learning curve was just figuring out how to do that. The first thing we were excited about with this project with eMusic was that I hadn’t realized how relatively few audiobooks there are. I guess the barrier is the cost of making them: the studio time, the actors and all of that stuff. So a book has to have sold 50,000 copies to even be in the audiobook realm, and we of course know that there are so many great books that don’t sell anywhere near 50,000 copies, let alone 5,000 copies. And particularly short stories are never ever in that realm.

YS: What we were excited about in terms of working with you was that you would have fun with this format, which for the most part is pretty staid.

EH: That’s what we’re looking to do more and more. I would almost see this as similar to the first couple of issues of McSweeney’s: can we do this? Is this allowed? That’s what this one is. I hope it turned out well and people enjoy listening to it.

YS: It absolutely did.

EH: It’s about doing it. And so what I’m hoping will be happening with the next few volumes is us now pushing ourselves beyond that. Now that we know it’s possible, what else can we do? How can we make it more fun and more interesting?

YS: I was really hoping for a story read on location, for example.

EH: Uh-huh. Originally they were all going to be like that and we’re still figuring out how to do that. One technical thing is that while we want certain sounds…

YS: It can’t be overwhelming.

EH: Right. We recorded a couple that we didn’t use for this one, but that we might use later or we might find out that they’re not usable because they are too location-y. Not just that the sounds can be overwhelming, but they can also make it harder to edit. We had everyone record everything twice, and sometimes we would cut from one version to the other, but you can’t cut if there’s some constant noise in the background other than their voice. These are some of the things where we’re figuring out what a good level of field sound is. And we thought we could — and we’re open to any ideas you or anyone else would have on the subject — but we thought we could just have them record it quietly, and then record ambient noise in that location and then we would edit them together. We thought about that, but also it could be forcing it. We don’t want to become precious. If you’re not really doing it, then what’s the point? It gets too stylized.

YS: My favorite moment in this whole collection is when Jonathan Ames says he needs a glass of water.

EH: [Laughs] Right! That was all Chris Ying, who did all of the technical work on this. I don’t think Ames intended us to keep that; Chris just noticed it was a nice moment. So we’re all about accidental moments like that. Or one other thing I really like is that Jack Pendarvis got Joey Lauren Adams to say two lines, this minor minor thing. We didn’t know that was going to happen; I guess she was just hanging out with him. I don’t know how it happened. I still don’t know. So we’re still trying to figure out how to encourage unpredictable things to happen. We’re still getting the hang of that, but I imagine it will happen more and more.

YS: I’m guessing for these writers this was the first time they had done an audiobook.

EH: Maybe not for Ames. Certainly he’s done radio before. For everyone else, though, definitely. I was really impressed with how well they all read, also. That was not a given. When I talked to some other audiobook person about this project, they were warning against it because they said authors always wanted to read their own books, but you can’t let them, you have to get an actor. Amateurs shouldn’t get involved. But of course we’re all about amateurs.

YS: You’re breaking up again.

EH: Oh! I’m pacing again.

YS: I have to imagine that everyone was nervous about this. Did you have to convince anyone?

EH: We let that take care of itself. Once we figured out who to contact — because obviously we’ve worked with all of these people before so we knew who would be more receptive to this than others — people seemed pretty game about it. If we had said, ‘Go to this studio, we’ve reserved an hour of time blah blah blah’ then that would have been more nerve-wracking. Instead we said, ‘Get on the computer in your basement and plug in the mic.’

YS: In your nylon shorts.

EH: [Laughs] In your nylon shorts. The only ambient noise is the swishing of the nylon. That’s our trademark. Who knows how many times they did it, or how nervous they were before, but I think the setting made it all pretty abstract. Also maybe they thought no one would ever listen to it.

YS: There’s always that comfort. I have to ask about the cover, which is not at all what I was expecting, and is amazing.

EH: [Laughs] We didn’t know what we were expecting either. What were you expecting?

YS: I envisioned a minimalist aesthetic, I guess from both the website and the journals.

EH: The main reason was we looked at the site and saw the small little covers. So if it’s going to have to work at two inches by two inches or whatever, that’s a whole different requirement than working in six inches by nine inches, the book size. So we thought, we’re doing this just for eMusic, just for this page, so that’s an advantage. Instead of repurposing something we’ve done for a whole different context, we make it just for this. So everything was about that: a bold image, text that would stand out. A dinosaur? I don’t know.

YS: Who can argue with a dinosaur?

EH: It’s a basic format that we can repeat for the next three. A different dinosaur maybe? [Laughs] The next one is all going to be romantic stories, so maybe we should do two dinosaurs holding hands.

YS: Were you familiar with eMusic before?

EH: I knew about it, but that’s all. It seemed neat, but I was only casually aware.

YS: Did we give you comp subscriptions or anything?

EH: No, and I’ve been too embarrassed to bring it up! [Laughs]

YS: Ha! Okay, well we’ll take care of that once we get off the phone.

EH: That’d be great. But it definitely seems like ethos-wise a very good fit, and a place we were happy to partner with. It seems like a natural symmetry.

YS: Are there any McSweeney’s pieces that are either particularly appropriate or amazingly inappropriate for this format?

EH: We were thinking about that. We have done some that are mostly or entirely spoken, dialogue between two people and then there’s one that’s dialogue between about 16 people that maybe we’ll do eventually. We have dreams of doing one that’s a radio play, a radio drama. Hopefully we’ll figure that out someday. Amazingly inappropriate… that’s a good goal to have. There’s a piece online actually — yeah, this is the one — that’s a list of email addresses that are really hard to say over the phone. Let me find this. Yeah, okay. I can’t even tell you these because it would be impossible. I’ll just send you a link. [Editor's note: this is the link, and yes it is amazing.] To be really inappropriate it could just be smutty, and that would be a letdown. It would have to be something that physically cannot be spoken somehow.

YS: We need to try that.

EH: Push the limits of audio. You’ll see what I’m talking about in a second.

YS: Anything you want to point out about any of these five writers?

EH: We’re doing a book by Jessica Anthony this spring. Her debut novel.

YS: Why did Keith decide to record on the bridge?

EH: That was our first attempt at ambient noise.

YS: You mean he couldn’t go on location to a COBRA base and record it?

EH: He animates himself and heads over… I think it was just, well the house seems kind of boring, so let’s go somewhere. We’re still learning. That’s a point to underscore. These are our baby steps. Being on a bridge? Better than not being on a bridge. There’s danger. Things happen on bridges. They get blown up, people fall off them. Things go quickly over them. Drawbridges. You know, how could there not be a bridge?