bigWOWO interviews The Minority Militant

Jaehwan: I didn’t know you were an antiwar protestor. That’s really cool. Were you part of a specific antiwar organization? Was this for the invasion of Iraq, the Terror War, etc?

You all touched upon a lot of interesting issues in the podcasts. It’s always good to hear from voices like SE Asian Americans and working class people, who often get marginalized.

What are you doing with all these podcasts that you’ve been making– other than posting links to them on this website or F44s? Spreading the word and disseminating them for greater access is important. Like a central online archive of the podcasts such as Fallout Central had. You never know who is listening and can be reached out there.

Militant Minority: Since you are a writer, have you ever considered going to grad school to get an MFA in creative writing? I don’t know if the military would pay for grad school but it could be something to look into.

An MFA program would be good because you are immersed in a community of writers that can help improve your craft and let you make connections to advance your writing career. If not an MFA program, then hooking up with some community of writers can be really beneficial, as you probably know.

For a writer, I think one important thing is having a job that isn’t too demanding on your time and allows you to devote your energies to your writing–yet still be able to pay the bills. Getting a proofreader or editing job in the publishing industry would be nice, but it’s not a requisite.

Thanks for the support, guys. I’d love to be part of the next round of podcasts. Regarding Larry’s suggestion on an MFA program, I think we’ve come to a new age in media technology. The direction I’m going with writing might just exclude the traditional publisher and literary agent route. I think this era will be run by the readers and not the gatekeepers. I might not even attempt to publish it through an agent anymore. I’ll just do it myself. I do workshop every month or so with a fiction writing group and we give each other very constructive feedback. Sure, there might be the conventional mindset that there is a stigma attached to self-published works, but there are plenty of success stories. I won’t buy into all of them. But I’d just rather do that and have absolute control over every aspect of the process. I could care less about profits.

What do you guys think about that alternate route?

TMM:

I was going to mention James, but it looks like he beat me to the punch! He already has two books in his name!

I just finished reading a really good book by Jason Epstein on the publishing industry. It’s called “Book Business,” and the author was a bigshot publisher who dealt with the likes of Nabokov and Norman Mailer. See it here. It tells you everything about what has happened in the industry during the last generation. Epstein mentions self-publishing and print-on-demand, and while he’s somewhat ambivalent on it, he does say that it will help empower people who ordinarily would not get a shot. He doesn’t specifically mention Asian Americans, but I think we’re the kind of people he’s thinking about.

The thing that I would worry about is exactly what James mentions, namely the publicity and promotion. If it’s a long work of fiction and you would like it to make a huge impact on society, it’s hard to compete unless your book is in every Borders and Barnes and Noble (Epstein has an interesting opinion on this too), and it’s hard to get it there unless you go through conventional channels. There are few people who can do this without selling out, so it’s a bit of a Catch-22.

Maybe we could talk about this during our next teleconference.

Congrats on setting up a fiction workshop. That’s definitely useful. Are your people mostly Asian? Are they activist? What’s the common bond? (Is there one?)

We’re pretty diverse. Started via the help of Craigslist last year. Most of them have degrees and full time jobs. So I guess it makes it all the more interesting. I also try workshopping at a Writing Center in the university I graduated from as well.

I checked out some of Alpha’s work but don’t really have the spare change to buy them. I workout a lot so I’m sure it would be beneficial in some way or another. I checked out the link on Epstein. I’ve heard of people getting bought out by publishers after examining their success stories. But then again, that’s pretty rare.

But with the decline of books sales at traditional outlets outside of BN and Amazon, and the widespread plunge of newspaper circulation sales, I’d put all my money — or what’s left in my pocket — on internet publishing via blogs, news sites, and e-books any day.

I totally fell you. I’ve never read BB yet. I’ll check it out. I used to be a writing consultant for the writing center at my university so it’s good to read other people’s work as well. But if you ever want to exchange pieces in the future, let me know.

[...] go over to his blog right now and check him out. Or, you can check out my interview with him here. He’s had an interesting life as a Laotian immigrant who joined the U.S. Navy right after [...]