Guest post by MFA student Kate Tooley

When I first moved to New York almost four years ago, I knew I wanted to write, but I also was aware that I knew next to nothing about the world of publishing or how to get involved in New York’s literary community. I’d spent five years doing theater and I had a lot of catching up to do; I started going to readings, events and conferences, but without a lot of direction or intention. The Slice conference in Brooklyn especially helped me find my feet (and they have great scholarship options for students!), but there are tons of great events in NYC and beyond, and I’ve found that the times I’ve gotten the most out of them were the times I was most strategic and thoughtful about what I wanted to get out of them. With Brooklyn Book Festival going on this week, I wanted to share a bit of what I learned through trial and error, that will hopefully help you skip some of the error part of attending “bookish” events.

Research and Plan
Putting a couple of hours in beforehand to research the people who are going to be at and is invaluable. At conferences, knowing which agents you want to strike up a conversation with and which panels they’re speaking on is a great way to get an idea if they’re someone you want to query. It will also save you from missing seeing a favorite author or literary figure who may be making only a quick appearance. This year I wasn’t on top of things (thanks MFA brain) and I missed Monique Truong. I may never get over it.

Work on Your Elevator Pitch
The big things we have in common at lit events are typically that we’re all readers and mostly writers. Especially at conferences, people are going to ask you what you’re working on. It’s a great opportunity to practice getting that answer down to a few sentences instead of the half hour long storytelling event it tends to be. (Is this just me? It might just be me.) It’s an easy way to start a conversation and will teach you what people find interesting about your story, what might be selling points you never thought of, and what aspects of it might not be as clear as you think.

Plan to Attend Readings and Panels Outside Your Special Area of Interest
It’s good to hit panels that speak to your specific concerns, but it can be surprisingly useful to go to one or two that might not initially jump out at you. For example, I recently attended a panel on literary non-profits, and not only was it a great way to discover volunteer opportunities, I learned a lot about an aspect of the writing world I was unfamiliar with.

Talk to Everyone
It’s easy to think your only goal should be to meet agents and authors when you’re at an event, but I’ve learned so much from conversations with other attendees. I’ve found writers whose careers I’m still following and whose work I love, and made friends that have become invaluable writing buddies and great resources.

Talk to Agents
This one is conference specific, but important. I know I said don’t only talk to agents, but seriously do actually talk to agents. That said, you’ll save everyone a lot of time if you do some research beforehand: know who works with writers in your genre, who’s sold a book you love, who is passionate about some topic or issue you care about. If you have something genuine to say (instead of just spamming), I’ve typically found agents who come to conferences are more than happy to engage (and I’ve even gotten query requests I wasn’t expecting).

Participate
If you’re comfortable, speak up in sessions; ask questions after readings; chat with authors after their panels; get a book signed; do a round table talk; or strike up a conversation with the folks manning the booths at Brooklyn Book Fest. I (seriously) understand the urge to keep to yourself and the difficulty of approaching strangers, but I’ve also learned the value of pushing outside my comfort zone one small interaction at a time.  

Embrace the Ambiguity
Agents and editors are individuals with unique preferences, methods, and pet peeves, and nearly every author I’ve heard speak has had a unique career trajectory. If I’ve learned anything after four years of going to events, it’s that if you’re looking for one set of sure-fire rules or a magic recipe for success, you’re not going to find it. One agent’s “must”, is another’s “never”. The thing that got one author in the door left another with the door shut in their face. (The only thing everyone seems to agree on is that you should follow submission rules and make sure you’re writing something you really, deeply care about.)

Take Care of Yourself
Events large and small can all be overwhelming, so making sure your mind and body have what they need is key to a positive experience. Try to get some sleep beforehand and bring snacks and water; if you need a few minutes to yourself, take them. Anxiety is a very real thing, and there’s value in showing up, no matter what level of participation you’re comfortable with. If you don’t have the spoons to talk to agents or authors in person, you can always follow them on Twitter or Instagram; live tweeting from an event is a lower-stress way to establish some contact and get on their radar (caveat: do make sure quotes are accurate and remember that most authors don’t appreciate being tagged in negative reviews).  Additionally, following folks on social media beforehand can help you decide whether or not you’re comfortable approaching them in person.

More than anything over the last four years, going to events has helped me to feel like I was part of a community and helped me stay motivated, connected, and active. It has been the thing that gives me a fresh jolt of energy when I need it most. As a grad student, I have the privilege of being a part of a great community here at TNS, but I’m grateful to know that after graduation there will be conferences and readings, and Book Festivals to help me continue building my writing family.

"Rocky Halpern is a writer, sex educator, lifelong nomad, and second year MFA creative writing candidate with a concentration in nonfiction. He is the 2019 recipient of the Bette Howland Nonfiction Award, and currently working on a memoir about his experience coming to terms with being a gay, transgender man during a time in his life where in which he feared being a man was synonymous with being a monster. He is a lifelong theatre nerd, lover of trashy celebrity memoirs, and the color pink." 

1. Who is your favorite villain, and who is your favorite protagonist in literature?

My favorite villain would have to be the talented Mr. Tom Ripley. I guess I'm a sucker for a brooding anti-hero dripping in gay subtext and the blood of his perceived enemies.

My favorite protagonist is Alison Bechdel's unflinching and earnest characterization of her childhood/younger self in Fun Home and Are You My Mother? Bechdel was the first memoirist who helped me understand how impactful the truth could be, and that sometimes you've got to be your own hero. 

2. When did you know you were a writer?

I knew I was a writer when I was trying to do anything besides write, but still found myself surrounded by little scraps of ideas I was too insecure to follow through with. I realized I owed it to myself to try, because the itch wasn't going away. 

3. What are you currently working on?

Right now I'm working on my memoir, which is centered around three generations of men in my family and my experience coming to terms with being transgender. I have also been working on a young adult novel about a trans gay boy who loves musical theatre. I spent my entire tween and teen years searching for every single book about LGBT kids, and there just weren't that many. And there were like none about trans kids, which is probably why it took me well into adulthood to discover that about myself. I think if I had even read one book about a boy like me, it would have changed everything. So, I want to write the book that would have saved me as a kid. 

4. How has your writing process changed over the years?

When I was 13, I would write these terrible, angsty poems about drowning in blood and eating dead flowers. My mother found them and I was promptly sent to therapy. I kept writing bad poetry about dying, but would immediately tear up the poems afterwards so no one could ever find them. So, I guess my subject matter has improved, and I don't immediately throw my writing into the trash anymore (though I am still tempted to do so at times). 

5. Describe your writing style in one sentence.

“All of us invent ourselves. Some of us just have more imagination than others" -Cher

Five Questions, by Nicole L. Drayton. Nicole is a writer, screenwriter and independent filmmaker based in Brooklyn, NY.  She holds a Bachelor of Science in Liberal Arts from The New School, and currently works for the university in the MFA in Creative Writing Program office.

By Liz Sheldon

Thanks to the cooperation of the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) and Creative Writing at The New School, as well as the tireless efforts of our students and faculty, we are able to provide interviews with each of the NBCC Awards Finalists for the publishing year 2018.

Liz Sheldon, on behalf of Creative Writing at The New School and the NBCC, interviewed Christopher Bonanos about his book Flash: The Making of Weegee The Famous. As the city editor of New York magazine, Christopher Bonanos is no stranger to the hustle it takes to make it in the NYC media world. But that inside perspective is just part of what Flash: The Making of Weegee the Famous, his new NBCC-nominated biography of mid-century crime and pop photographer Weegee, so much fun to read. In exploring how tenement kid Arthur Fellig became self-taught photographer, early branding expert, and true New York character Weegee, Bonanos (whose first book was Instant: The Story of Polaroid) also takes us on a romp through the history of the tabloid industry, the rise and fall of the New York mob, and even the golden age of Hollywood. Bonanos took a few minutes to chat about Weegee’s wild legacy and the process of distilling it into Flash.

LS: First things first: Why Weegee?

CB: “I would say two things: one, I usually write about New York City history, and the history of the press, and two, because my previous book about photography. And they all cross paths with him.”

LS: In fact, so much seems to cross paths with him—the history of New York, the origins of tabloid journalism, the evolution of street photography as an art form...

CB: “It’s so true, he keeps popping up in other people’s stories, which makes him an interesting person to trace through the culture. And you can follow him through his work, as well as through his life, because his pictures are a great history of New York in his time.”

LS: The book includes hour-by-hour replays of some of his nights hitting the streets and hustling to get back and forth to crime scenes and dark room in those early days. How did you put those timelines together??

CB: “The International Center of Photography has his estate, so some of it was from their archive. They have a lot of manuscript pages from magazine articles, and a few drafts of the autobiography he wrote, so I could go through the cut material for details. But mostly I put together the blow-by-blow by going through all the newspapers from those years. His career in the thirties is not very well-documented. Later on he becomes easier to trace because he started to get famous, especially once he started working for P.M., the now-defunct paper that turned him into a character. He authored columns for them, and they also wrote more about him. But before that, he wasn’t wasn’t really in the habit of saving much of his work, so a lot of what he shot went into the anonymous stream of news photographs. But about every other week a paper would run an image from him with a credit, so I tracked his nights via those. What’s challenging about that though is that most of the papers from that time still haven’t been digitized. There were nine dailies in New York at the time, and the only way to find all the photo credits is to turn every damn page on microfilm. So I would sit there in the New York Public Library every Saturday and Sunday—I can tell you from experience they’re also open late two nights a week—and I would just turn pages. I went through five years of the New York Post, and five years of the New York World-Telegram, and five years of The New York Sun. There were patchy databases of the Post and the Sun online, and two of the bigger papers, The New York Times and the New York Herald Tribune are digitally searchable. It was a big job—but those three papers, and The New York Evening Journal, were the ones that credited him the most in the early days, so I focused my efforts there.”

LS: A running theme in the book is the question of how much posing and fudging Weegee did to get the shot—and also the extent to which his work is considered capital A art, and you’re pretty egalitarian about it. How did you decide how much of your feelings about those topics to insert?

CB: “The academic art historians have their own strong opinions on this. I like the academics who have written about Weegee a lot, but they look at it as purely artistic practice. I come at it differently because I am also a member of the press, and I see how newspaper and magazines photographers work. It fascinates me how we see these pictures so differently. I’m thinking about the way our New York photographers have shot and what it’s like in a press scrum, and art historians are just thinking about the end result. Mind you, I’m not suggesting that my perspective is better or more accurate, it’s just different.”

“In terms of actual value judgement, I think he was well in line with the values of his time. The business of occasionally setting up a picture—I think a lot of news photographers did that at the time. There are so many stories in memoirs of the time of a photographer giving a kid 10 bucks to go stand in the right place. You can get on your high horse about it as a journalism critic, or you can say, ‘that’s how the job was done then’. That’s just a fact. And the pictures sometimes do tell the truth even when they’ve gotten a little help.”

LS: Can you talk a bit more about how being an editor affected how you tackled this story?

CB: “As a member of the press, there are times that I can recognize what he’s going for in a photograph that an art critic might not—and vice versa! He was also working during the Great Depression, when the tabloid and newspaper business was going great guns, but it was not as rich as it had been a few years earlier. There were mergers going on that diminished the number of outlets at some points, and it was a place where freelancers were scraping by. All of which might feel kind of familiar if you’re paying attention to the industry.”

LS: Part of how Weegee became a household name was by inserting himself into his news photographs. Was he the only photographer to take things that far?

CB: “I’m not sure, and I’ll tell you why. Because you do see people pointing in pictures, but you don’t know who they are. Is that some random passerby that the photographer grabbed, or is it himself? I would guess that what Weegee did was a little more unusual. He was such a lone wolf and he wanted his face in the paper. I bet he felt like he was putting one over the photo editors now and then. And it did work for him. As I said at one point in the book, he created a personal brand before we had that word, and it has lasted a hundred years. He was built for the age of Instagram. He was self-promoting, and what is Instagram if not a tool for self-promotion? I always say if he were alive today he would be pitching a reality T.V. show about his life called I Shoot By Night. I’d watch it!”

LS: Do you have favorite of the anecdotes about his wild adventures?

CB: “What I love especially are the news stories behind the photographs. Like, for example the image of William Hessler, who turned up in a trunk in Brooklyn. I love the detail that he was found with 48 ice pick wounds in his chest and a nickel in his pocket, and the nickel was left there by mobsters in order to give the victim car fare home. I mean, c’mon!”

“In terms of his life story, the joyful hustle of it all is incredibly pleasurable. I also love that story about the photo that really got him into the game in 1936, when he went racing out to photograph the couple of murderer teenages in Bayonne New Jersey at four in the morning. It’s an amazing story of getting there in the two-hour window after the morning papers came out without any pictures, and before the deadline for the afternoon papers.”

LS: He’s such an interesting lens through which to view the NYC media landscape. Was he just in the right place at the right time?

CB: “I think that’s sort of half true. In the beginning he was just a working stiff press photographer. He had some talent, but he was nothing special. Over the first few years of shooting, partly because he worked all the time and partly because he turned out to have an eye, he learned how to do it as well as anyone, and then to elevate it past the level of workaday, take the picture for the paper and up to something more meaningful. But he really embraced the job you could get at the time. He was very practical that way. He also got started very late. He didn’t quit his job to go freelance until he was 36, and he didn’t get famous until he was in his forties. Nobody does that! It’s really wild.”

LS: How did you hit on the irreverent, kind of fast-paced tone of the book? It’s such a great match for the story you’re telling.

CB: “That’s something I thought about a great deal. My own voice as a writer is shaped by magazine work, so I was part way there. I write for a popular audience. But I did make a conscious choice that I wanted to avoid any sort of formality in the language. I wanted it to be a restrained version of a tabloid voice. Now I am not a tabloid writer, they write short sentences and I write long sentences, but I wanted a little of that snap and verve to get in there somehow, and I was never sure if I’d got it. So it’s great to hear if people are seeing that in there.”

“The definitive quality of Weegee’s photos is this sort of playful ghoulishness, and kind of reveling in the picture of the dead guy bleeding on the sidewalk, about which Weegee said ‘I really wanted to make it look like he was taking a little nap.’ So I tried to summon up that voice. Weegee’s particular New York-accented idioms are also very familiar to me. It’s pretty much the way my grandparents and their friends spoke, and his voice, which I have come to know on recordings pretty well, is one that I recognize from real life. And maybe that got in my head a little bit too. There’s a video called Weegee Tells How, it’s a recording he made in 1958 explaining how he made some of his more favorite photographs. You can hear his accent, and it’s pretty unbelievable.”

LS: Weegee was so prolific—how did you pick which photos to include in the book?

CB: “I had a long list! I had a budget, so that determined the number. There’s about 60, and it was definitely painful chucking out a few at the last minute. Sometimes I wanted to illustrate a particular anecdote or make a point about his photographic technique. Other times it was too good a photo to leave out. For example The Critic has to appear, it’s so famous. Then in three or four few cases, they were pictures I just loved too much not to include. There’s one photograph of Robert Joyce, the guy who drank 18 beers and shot two guys in an argument about the Brooklyn Dodgers. It’s an amazing face, and I just knew I had to have it.”

LS: I couldn’t decide at the end if this is a triumphant story, or a sad one. What do you think?

CB: “I don’t know either. It ended badly for him in that he was broke. But he wasn’t alone, he had Wilma, his on-again, off-again partner. She was the silent hero who safeguarded his archive. He ended sort of forgotten and not really happy with the way things had turned out for him—but at the same time, there is a sort of triumph, in that he wanted to be famous, he wanted to not be forgotten. It’s 2019, he’s in a 400-page book and here we are talking about his story.”

Christopher Bonanos is city editor at New York magazine, where he covers arts and culture and urban affairs. He is the author of Instant: The Story of Polaroid. He lives in New York City with his wife and their son.

Liz Sheldon is the Editorial Director at Of a Kind and a current MFA candidate in fiction at The New School.